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June 16, 2007
Beam Me Up Scotty
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| Evan Tuchinsky, in this
weeks issue of the Chico News and Review, runs
through the City Manager's 54 budget items to reach a budget in the
black. I agree with a lot of his suggestions, but think adding a
quarter cent tax increase is a bit premature. Another of Evan's suggestions was to not end grant funded jobs unless the employee wants to leave. A grant funded job is one where a single chunk of money is given to the city by some agency, a job is formed, and when the money runs out the city picks up the new annual cost. Considering the fact that most of our budget spending is related to employee costs, taking on new grant funded employees would seem to be a bad long-term idea. But I have a "less government is good" solution to reducing our annual cash shortfall. The city operates a number of "enterprise funds" which perform like a business. They bill customers, and track costs. If they run in the red the General Fund pays the bill. I wrote a blog on "enterprise funds" back in January. The Private Development Enterprise Fund has been an albatross around the city's budget neck recently. Back in January it was estimated to be $6,216,000 in the red by next year. That appears to be a cumulative shortfall. In 2006 it was roughly $1,000,000 in the red. The city's annual financial report describes this fund as "accounts for private development planning and building inspection and subdivision planning and inspection". Since the word subdivision comes up, I emailed City Manager Greg Jones to find out if Planning Commission / developer activity was driving this fund into the red. Jones' response was... "In terms of the Private Development Fund, the running deficit is due to a couple of things. First, from a policy perspective, the General Fund has typically contributed to the Private Development Fund to cover the more general services provided by our staff on the second floor, not attributable to a major development application. A good example would be a homeowner coming in to the counter asking about adding a deck onto their house. The General Fund picks up that cost, rather than charging for the consultation through some sort of fee, since the project may not require any sort of application, permit, etc. The amount of that General Fund transfer has been the topic of debate in the past. Secondly, the City is continually behind in updating the fees upon which various services are based, so the fees are "behind" reality in terms of costs of service. ... Legally, any current deficit will have to be made up from the General Fund, as fees cannot be legally set to recover previous services' costs. So the existing deficit will need to be made up by several years of General Fund contributions, at the expense of other General Fund services (Police, Fire, right of way maintenance, etc.). Basically, in comparison to cost, we are "undercharging" for services being provided." It would seem to me that correcting fee amounts is one possible solution to the problem with the Private Development Enterprise Fund. Another is to reduce inspections or unneeded "consultations". Consultation on construction design does not need to be a "city service". This can, and is done, by private parties. Inefficient government services that duplicate private, for profit, services should be avoided. This is even more true in a mature and skill driven industry like construction. Freeing up city engineers to work on city projects would likely be another side effect of reducing consultation services paid for by the Private Development Enterprise Fund. Balancing this fund could save the city millions each year. I'd rather have better police and fire protection as a result of my tax donation than be assured my neighbor's deck was built really well. |
Posted by Lon at June 16, 2007 09:00 AM
Comments
Evan also agree's that Downtown parking meter overtime tickets should be raised to $20. Maybe we can create a windfall if we applied the same predatory solutions to other shopping districts. Regulate private parking lots. install timers and send the revenuer in to collect when people stay a little to long.
Mike Trolinder
Posted by: Mike Trolinder at June 16, 2007 10:55 AM
Mike,
I'd have to agree with you that raising parking fines downtown is not a "fair" form of increasing revenue. I'm assuming that's sarcasm when you suggest regulating private lots. Increasing a fine is probably in the middle of my scale of solutions with raising taxes being bad and cutting expenses being good.
Raising fines should be done not to raise revenue, but to change behavior associated with the fines. With parking downtown we've already had increased rates that have not increased revenue to the predicted levels.
The increased cost of parking downtown, in relation to other venues, is an economic hurdle that retailers have to figure into their plans. They should also assume that changes in fee structure could reduce the number of customers they have. On the other hand, non-retail professionals can look at parking fees differently. To my company parking costs are more like a utility fee.
On another note I think that removing meters from all of downtown would probably turn the entire area into student parking. Until we address the total parking problem in the downtown area metering should probably stay.
Finally, I quit driving to my office because of the need to find $4 in quarters when one of my company's two leased spots are unavailable. I've always thought it was interesting that scrambling for change was the threshold that got me on the B-line and riding my bike for about 80% of the work week.
Lon
Posted by: Lon at June 18, 2007 06:38 AM