Announced at the last city council meeting was that the city will have a report from CityGate by June, which will be ready for the public by August on fire staffing issues.
The Vanguard has been told that the four-person fire engine crew is very much on the table. Previous research has shown Davis is one of the few cities that has kept the four-person team.
Long before Joe Krovoza and Rochelle Swanson ran for the city council and won, I talked to them about the budget. They told me what I wanted to hear, but their first six months in office were very disappointing. Instead of a strong new majority, we saw a show being run by Don Saylor.
By E. Roberts Musser –
A Proposition 218 notice is on its way to citizens’ mailboxes, to let everyone know the city plans to significantly increase water rates by approximately threefold. Go to the City of Davis website, then click on the water rate calculator. It will determine what your water bill will look like by the year 2016. Of course that doesn’t really reveal what your City of Davis bill will ultimately be. Sewer and sanitation rates are going to go up as well, but not by nearly as much as water rates. The less water you use, the smaller your total bill should be, since water and sewer rates are based on consumption.
Mayor’s Proposal Supported 5-0 by Council Takes Hammer to the Budget and Puts City On Path to Fiscal Stability – Just as it appeared all hope was lost to make the kind of serious structural changes needed in this budget, Mayor Joe Krovoza pulled out a proverbial hammer and hammered the city into this decade.
The Vanguard’s analysis of the budget suggests that while Interim City Manager Paul Navazio has attempted to tweak the budget, what is really needed is for the council to throw out the budget, stop the attempts to balance a current year budget with rosy assumptions and nickel and diming tiered approaches, and work on critical structural change.
Our examination suggests that are six critical flaws in the current budget, perhaps a seventh. We made seven short-term suggestions for immediate savings and five suggestions for savings down the line.
There was a very nice letter to the editor in the Enterprise that argued that costs of water will encourage conservation.
Writes Chris Lambert of Davis, “The negative reactions so far to the Sacramento River water project are a perfect illustration of the Tragedy of the Commons. We are depleting at least two shared resources: the groundwater basin, and the health of downstream aquatic life. This is the inevitable result of too many water users and a limited supply.”
Last week, a Vanguard analysis found that the city had achieved a good deal of savings through the reduction of overtime.
As we noted last week, when we ran our initial study of the 100K Club of Davis, we noted that there were 61 members of that 100K Club of Davis. Of those, 48 were public safety employees and 38 were firefighters.
By nature I am an optimist. My heart tells me to expect the best. Unfortunately, my experience has taught me to fear the worst. To throw out one more overused cultural statement before diving into this topic I will suggest that the Who was onto something when they sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Our biggest concern, up until last week, was that not enough people in this community knew that water rates would be tripling. That is no longer the case and I will extend appreciation to the Davis Enterprise for their coverage of the issue, particularly Crystal Lee’s story on the Prop 218 process and Jonathan Edwards’ coverage of the water rates.
However, we remain concerned about the implications of these water rate increases. I have been called irresponsible here for my stance on water. I will not shy away from it, however. The problem that I see is that water is not the only crisis we face and when put against issues such as the city budget and education, as well as county social services, I would not rank the water issue among the highest.
Last week we noted the fact that the leadership in City Hall, the Department heads and Management, were by and large receiving as much if not more in salary than they were back in 2007. We argued that the city could save between 300 and 500 thousand dollars annually through a flat reduction in salary for those making over 87 thousand a year, who were either department heads or from the management group.
We noted personnel cuts, to date, have largely been achieved through the elimination of positions due to retirement or transfer. However, replacement employees often receive the same salary if not more than their predecessors.
The city council moved forward with their plans for a Prop 218 notice, despite the clear insufficiency of the process. The problem this community faces is captured perfectly by Bob Dunning’s most recent column.
Mr. Dunning quotes a reader stating: “Between the steep rise in water rates and the school bond measure that just passed, I feel severely beaten up here in Davisville.”
While the Vanguard has pushed hard against the tripling of water rates by the city, the city is looking for ways to avoid pricing people out of their homes with the rate hikes.
Due to the cost of constructing the surface water project through the Woodland and Davis Joint Powers Act, Davis water rates will rise each of the next five years and eventually triple to over 1300 dollars per year.
The good news this week is that the Davis Enterprise finally figured out that the city’s water rates were going to triple. They ran a good article by Crystal Lee on the Proposition 218 process. They followed that up with an excellent piece by Jonathan Edwards on the tripling of the rate hikes.
Suddenly, now Bob Dunning for the first time has a piece on the water rate hikes entitled, “Your wallet: A river runs through it.”
Our chief concern in the past few months was that few people had learned about the city’s impending rate hikes that will triple water rates over the next five year. That problem is no more. Two Davis Enterprise articles have laid out details of the rate increases over the next five years and one of them laid out in good detail the process by which to file a Prop 218 protest.
However, even with that information, a Prop 218 protest, which requires a majority of property owners to file complaints by a certain date, seems highly unlikely.
Vanguard Recommends 10 Percent Across the Board Pay Cut For Department Heads and Management Group – The interim city manager has proposed a budget with two tiers of cuts to services for the public. However, neither the interim city manager himself nor his staff, nor members who signed the MOU as “Individual Management Employees” have seen their salaries go down since 2007, prior to the beginning of the latest economic downturn and budget cuts.
A huge crowd of more than 150 people packed the room in a show of strong support for the struggling neighborhood market. They came to lend moral support, give valuable community feedback and send a strong message that the West Davis community was not going to let their store go without at least a valiant fight.
There was no consensus reached or explanation offered as to why the market was struggling, though owner Dennis DeLano indicated that it generally takes about three years for people to identify with a store and begin to shop exclusively.
Budget is Balanced on Optimistic Assumptions That Excludes Areas of Spending Increases in the Next Five Years – On this night, Interim City Manager Paul Navazio finally admitted what we all knew, his budget assumptions are rosy, with small changes in them that mean huge swings in the revenue projections. He also finally admitted that the city is not allocating nearly enough for road re-pavement.
City government had done little to bring about change in the vacancy of the market. However, the Vanguard published a series of scathing articles with pictures of the dilapidated state of the store that helped force the city to use its powers as a regulator to force the owner to make improvements to the store and bring the sides back to the table.
In 2004, the voters of Davis passed a half-cent sales tax that was supposed to preserve city services from cuts. Instead, what we saw is that the $3 million for sales tax went almost directly to a 36% pay increase for firefighters. It did not “preserve” city services from cuts, rather it increased the cost of city services to the taxpayer.
Last year voters renewed that half-cent sales tax, which yields roughly $3 million annually that goes to the city’s general fund. For the last several years we have noted with increasing alarm the state of the city’s roadways and, increasingly, the lack of money available to fund road maintenance that used to come from other sources.
One of the big questions this year has been the question of how to improve Davis’ business climate and to bring in new businesses. Toward that end we have seen things like DSIDE (Designing a Sustainable and Innovative Davis Economy), surveys done by the City of Davis, and partnering with the university on concepts like the Innovation Hub.
We have not always agreed with the approach. For instance, we have concern about plans to bring business parks into peripheral land in the Business Park Strategy. And we question whether the city should re-zone Cannery for housing or mixed-use, when the zoning change can set off a cascading impact on land-use policy.
