Tonight’s council meeting will address how City Manager Steve Ando proposes to dramatically reduce the city’s $8.3 million budget.
During the August 19 council meeting, the council directed city staff to look into cutting the city’s budget by at least $400,000.
Ando’s suggestions for tonight include a once-a-month furlough for all city workers except police officers, dispatchers and the senior recreation site director. Four city staff positions will also be on the cutting board.
In all, Ando’s recommendations will chop the city’s budget by $442,000 in an attempt to borrow a few years time before the city runs down its reserves.
The city will receive about $530,000 from Measure C sales tax money this year, but once the ¼-cent sales tax expires in March 2011, the city will face annual deficits in the $1.1 million range.
Also on tonight’s agenda is the consideration of a $667,510 architectural contract to remodel the Scotts Valley Sports Center for the new library facility on Kings Village Road.
There were 29 applicants for the contract and city staff recommends San Francisco-based Group 4 Architecture, Research + Planning Inc. for the contract.
AT A GLANCE:
WHAT: Scotts Valley City Council Meeting
WHEN: 6 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 2
WHERE: Scotts Valley City Hall, 1 Civic Center Drive
DETAILS: The meeting is open to the public.
The budget deficits go back to before the passage of Measure C (3 ½ years ago) when at that time the City was running an annual $800,000 deficit on a budget of $7,300,000.
In 2005 Measure C was proposed by Councilmen Bustichi and Johnson as a temporary 5 year tax increase to give the City time to restructure its finances. It was a good idea at the time however the City Council never followed through on needed budget cutting.
The City Council should have been reducing expenses during the last 3 ½ years, instead the City Council actually increased its annual budget spending by $1,000,000 to the current $8,300,000 level.
The proposed $442,000 in budget cuts now while large are not enough to fix the problem; the proposed cuts just delay when the City runs out of funds until until after the next City Council election.
Without greater cutting, our City Council will be spending more than $658,000 than the City takes in during a year when Measure C expires in 1 ½ years.
Despite all the rosy fiscal rhetoric we heard during the November Council race, it is clear that the City has serious financial problems that were made worse by the inaction of the current City Council to reduce its deficit spending.
As recently as May 21, 2009 Mayor Johnson was quoted in the Sentinel boasting:
“There are a lot of cuts being made by other entities in the county that we are not seeing here."
If he didn’t “see” the budget problem in May he wasn’t paying attention and if he did see the budget issues yet he told us everything was just fine, that is perhaps even worse.
How long will it be before Bustichi, Johnson and Lind acknowledge that they need to break their campaign promise against a renewal of Measure C; sadly there are few options left because cuts weren’t made earlier.