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By KEVIN McCALLUM
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
The Santa Rosa City Council on Thursday passed a $313 million budget that relies on future employee concessions and voters to approve a tax increase in November. But the council still does not know what kind of tax to pursue.
“We have dodged a bullet because it hasn’t been fired,” Councilman John Sawyer said of the decision to approve a budget that banks on a new tax.
Even after laying off dozens of workers, hiking park and recreation fees and proposing to charge people $5 to park at Howarth Park, the city’s new budget still contains a $3.8 million shortfall in the $109 million general fund.
The council is betting that it can bridge that gap through employee concessions worth $2.5 million and higher taxes voters would approve in the fall to help generate an additional $2 million.
If those don’t happen, however, council members vowed deeper, more painful cuts would follow.
“If those assumptions don’t pan out, of course we will have to do the right thing and come back and identify more cuts,” Mayor Susan Gorin said.
The council has hired a polling firm to assess what kind of tax is most likely to pass in the fall, but it hasn’t yet said what kind of revenue measures it might support.
A quarter-cent sales tax, lifting the cap on a business tax, a $50 parcel tax and a cell-phone tax have been mentioned as possibilities for a fall ballot measure.
While council members expressed gratitude to the various city departments for finding ways to make do with less, their discomfort with the remaining budget gap was apparent throughout the two-day budget hearing process.
“I think at the end we have a budget that’s kind of being held together by some baling wire and duct tape … and probably some chewing gum as well,” said Councilman Ernesto Olivares.
Sawyer said the budget, which passed unanimously and without much of the acrimony that has been evident in recent council debates, was anticlimactic because so much rests on future actions.
Overall, the total budget is decreasing only slightly, from $315 million to $312.5 million, a 2 percent reduction. The general fund, which pays for the bulk of city services and over which the council has the most control, will be $4.9 million smaller than last year, a 4 percent reduction.
The new budget contains 55 fewer total positions, 37 of which were filled and resulted in or will result in employee layoffs. Olivares said that there are few places left to cut workers that won’t result in lower levels of service to the community.
“There isn’t really any fat left in the city, and I think every position that we currently have is critical to the organization,” he said.
Gorin expressed confidence the city would survive a third year of smaller budgets hobbled by a recession that cut into the city’s sales and property taxes and fees.
“We’re still standing tall. We’ll weather through this,” she said.
David Heath, the city’s chief financial officer, said he’s worried about the rate of erosion in reserves of the city’s general fund, which have been cut in half in the past year, from $16 million to $7.9 million today, he said. Since the $3.8 million deficit will be in place when the budget goes into effect in July, the city will be burning through about $316,000 in reserves every month until the concessions are achieved or voters in November agree to new taxes.
“I’m concerned about our ability to achieve concessions and whether we’ll be able to raise $1.3 million in revenue for the whole year,” he said.
The $1.3 million is the amount identified in the budget that needs to be raised through higher revenue, such as new taxes or higher fees.
Since any taxes that might be approved on a ballot measure wouldn’t go into effect for at least six months, more like $2 million would need to be raised to offset further erosion of general fund reserves, Heath said.
The budget process involved various department heads outlining their budgets for the council and explaining how they plan to meet council goals.
The police and fire departments did not suffer as significant reductions in their budgets as some other departments. The Santa Rosa Fire Department’s $25.5 million budget was a 4 percent decrease from the current year, due largely to the elimination of four fire inspectors.
The Santa Rosa Police Department’s $39.9 million budget represented a 4 percent increase over the current year, due largely to a shift in the way 19 officers are funded.
Previously, salaries of those officers were funded by Measure O, the quarter-cent tax passed to support public safety and gang prevention programs. But the recession has eaten into Measure O funding, shifting the burden of funding those officers back onto the general fund.
Because of this, the department saw a $3.1 million increase, or 9 percent, in the department’s salary budget.
By comparison, the Recreation, Parks and Community Services budget has a 12 percent drop in its budget, falling to $13.2 million.
Gorin said the protection of public safety jobs is by design.
“We are cutting departments other than police and fire in a greater percentage because public safety is important to our community,” she said. “However, this is certainly not sustainable in the long term.”
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Didn’t make the meeting. What was the vote, 4-3 with the 4 being Gorin, Olivares, & Sawyer (all quoted) & probably Bender? Or 5-2? Or even 7-0? I’m sure nobody got exactly what they wanted, but it would be nice to know who voted for the final package, and what any holdouts held out over. All we get is that it wasn’t as acrimonious as some expected – well, good, but I still want to know who I might want to vote for next time out.
Great old picture! (Michael Frank and Mike McCoy are in audience)
…you can even almost make out McCoy’s handwritten notes:
http://www.watchsonomacounty.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/srcc.jpg
~jake
If you would you like to know who rules Santa Rosa?
Here’s the book for you: “Who Rules Santa Rosa and why it Matters” by M J WIlkinson.
It’s available at Copperfield’s Books 2316 Montgomery Dr Santa Rosa.
Other city staff has sacrificed enough. Public safety needs to sacrifice more. C’mon, they get paid just for the time they use to get dressed!
It is short sighted to ignore cuts to public safety. Doing more with less must become the credo if the budget is to be sustainable.
Salary cuts are the obvious solution to the budget woes coming mainly from public safety.