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I am voting no on Measure Q because it is an attempted bailout for ongoing city management problems, including:
- A history of poor City leadership to overcome our resident NIMBY power that has led to too few housing units, too few local businesses, and dismal sales tax revenue per capita.
- A history and trend of City politicians over-paying City staff working for unions and associations that contribute to their political campaigns.
- A failure to fund basic City services like road maintenance while spending on frivolity.
- Evidence that our City is deficient in its financial management practices.
On this last reason, members of the City Council and City management have been quoted saying that the most recent financial audit is “clean.” However, the Auditor’s January 24, 2024, Memorandum on Internal Control (summarized below) identifies the following serious problems:
- A number of material closing entries had been omitted or needed to be corrected. In addition, during the audit, we discovered and/or City staff proposed six additional post-closing journal entries.
- Bank reconciliations had only been completed as of July 2020… a full year behind.
- The Treasurer’s Report for the quarter ending September 30, 2020, was not prepared and reviewed until December 23, 2020, and was not submitted to the City Council until February 6, 2021.
- During fiscal year 2021, City staff determined that a loan made in fiscal year 2019 in the amount of $1.98 million had not been recorded as a loan receivable as required.
- During the current year audit, we followed up on the status of Significant Deficiencies identified on the Status of Prior Year Significant Deficiencies. We found that the following deficiencies had either been partially or not mitigated at June 30, 2021.
■ 2020-001 Segregation of Duties – Accounts Payable Process and Review
■ 2020-002 Segregation of Duties – Payroll
■ 2020-003 Purchasing Policy Compliance and Use of Purchase Orders
These noted audit deficiencies, including a repeat of problems found in the prior year audit, are indicative of dysfunction in the organization’s financial management and controls.
The problem with rewarding City management with tax increases is that it shelters them from having to do the needed hard work to fix what is broken in the system. At the very least Davis residents should demand that the City Council and City management clean up their financial management act before asking us to dig deep in our pockets to give them more of our hard-earned dollars.
Davis would be in so much better shape if they had people like Jeff Boone sitting on the city council.
Hey, I’m all for transparency. So yeah, lets get those records out in the open and squared away.
As far as City Leaders over coming NIMBYism? I think you forgot that the City Leaders represent the views and opinions of the people and it appears NIMBYism is alive and well in Davis. Everybody wants more affordable housing (affordable or more market rate)….just not in their own immediate backyard. Everybody wants to keep the streets from becoming congested with traffic; it takes infrastructure expansion to mitigate the impact of more housing on the streets…but where is the funding for that infrastructure expansion coming from?
I hate the city’s fiscal philosophy and lack of economic development plan too. But the city (the people) have pretty much said that they don’t want real and serious economic growth so the only way to pay the bills is to pay more taxes.
Voting No on Measure Q is essentially like having the mortgage come due, you need to pay for groceries but your plan to solve this is to go back to school, get a degree to get a really good job and not ask your parents for some money to pay for things or pay for some things with a credit card.
So if you think maintenance is bad now; not having a way to pay for it isn’t going to make it better.