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Living, Driving and Building in the Recovery Act
Within one year after President Obama signed the Recovery Act, almost a billion dollars has been invested in the San Diego region. A large chunk of the money has gone to the Camp Pendleton, Coronado and UCSD. However, even if you are not on base or campus, it is highly likely that you have been touched by the Recovery Act. Major public works construction projects have benefited from this spending, including the four-lane expansion of SR-76, construction of I-905, and the HOV lanes on I-805. Future funding has already been allocated to the construction of Otay Mesa crossing, the Oceanside transit station, and the high-speed rail to Los Angeles/Sacramento. And the Recovery Act funding is going to flow into our homes, in the form of solar panels and weatherization.
Pocket Change: Potholes-a-plenty
If all of San Diego’s 2,800 miles of paved streets were laid in a straight line, they would stretch across the United States. This road would be illuminated by 40,000 streetlights, and punctuated by a traffic signal or beacon every 1.5 miles.
Pocket Change: Experts chime in on the ‘state of the city’
If there was an animal to describe the mayor’s state of being in the State of the City address, it would be the tiger. Probably an old Siberian tiger marking his territory, whose growl is resonant, whose diet is stray stag (and occasionally a wild boar), and whose beaming bulk awes its privileged audience. Not only that the tiger is an apt animal for welcoming the Chinese year ahead, but that it epitomizes the valiance and the vanity in the show this week.
Mo’ Money, Less Tax
Revising history does not solve the revenue problem at City Hall. Nevertheless, San Diego City Councilmember Carl DeMaio attempted to do just that Monday by factually disputing that the City collects less revenue than comparable cities.
In response to a presentation of a draft Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for 2009, DeMaio objected to a statement about San Diego’s relatively low taxes and fees that he suggested was ” … just cut-and-paste from the Center on Policy Initiatives … I find this to be a factually inaccurate statement. I cannot vote for the CAFR with that line in it.” (Audit Committee, January 11, 2010)
The Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI) has raised the issue of the city’s low revenue for years, and has been validated by numerous independent sources.
City Bankruptcy?
The talk about the city going into bankruptcy to solve its budget woes is as flippant as talk about a family going to Las Vegas, so they can pay off their grocery bills. With a revenue stream of more than $1 billion annually, a pooled investment portfolio of $2 billion, and a tax-base with healthy GDP of over $50,000 per capita and rising, San Diego has few excuses.
The painful cuts to city services over the past three years would be akin a family starving itself to save dollars and cents, so that someone can go to Vegas to gamble it off.
Fire in the hole
As large-scale fires become a regular phenomenon in San Diego, we need to test the strength of the umbrella of public institutions providing local fire-fighting resources. Over the past three decades, this protection has been damaged in multiple ways.
First, Proposition 13 halved the collections of property taxes, which most fire districts relied on. No longer able to float general obligation bonds to pay for needed fire facilities, fire agencies had to backfill by cutting service levels. Proposition 13 imposed an insurmountable two-thirds voter requirement for approval of taxes that specifically funded firefighting. This is remarkable since Proposition 13 itself did not meet the two-thirds threshold.
A fee for paying your taxes
The bottom line is that businesses in San Diego pay the least for license fees among any of the cities for any type of business, at an average of a fifth of the average paid by businesses in the 10 largest cities in California.
Growth of business generates a demand for city services such as police, fire fighting, libraries, parks and road maintenance, for which the city cannot raise revenues except through a ballot measure. The post Proposition-13 dilemma that the city faces is to either stop business expansion, or undergo an expensive and politically charged election.
Public records acting up
One of the most significant embarrassments of public service is transparency — the government truly does not have much to hide behind. Transparency is the ability of anybody, anytime to peer into the privacy of any public employee, which is unparalleled in the private sector. Everything from how much the employee makes, to how she does her work is public record. The naked intrusiveness of Public Record Act (PRA) requests in regular business would make major corporations and their executives blush.
Property taxes in decline
The current economic conditions condensed into the budgetary cloud are brewing one of the darkest storms ever to threaten our city. It is the first time that I have seen revenue from property taxes actually fall. Not just fall in growth, or fall in forecasted percentage increase, or fall in share of revenue, but actually FALL, even when the cost of everything else rises. For a nearly $400 million revenue source for our general fund, a decrease of 2.3 percent is a significant dent in our ability to pay for neighborhood services.
Unemployment fluctuates with old and new seekers
According to the California Employment Development Department, the San Diego region reached a historic double-digit inflation rate in June. Although civilian employment, which reflects the jobs in the economy, hardly changed between May and June, the number of unemployed increased 5.1 percent to 158,000.
What falling sales tax revenue means
The current recession is deeper and broader than most of us have seen in our generation. Consumer confidence was at a 40-year low. Employment in retail sales plummeted, fewer tourists visited, and auto sales reached record lows, earlier this year. All of which means that San Diegans had $17 million less to spend this year on our general fund services such as police, fire, parks and libraries, than last year.
Every cent spent in this economy counts. A cent on every dollar of taxable goods purchased in the city goes to the General Fund. This is the fund that pays for services that the general public receives. The $210 million in sales tax expected to be generated this fiscal year is one of the most significant sources (18.3%) of the general fund. It is also a source that is tapped by the state to support general operations, with 11 states (including California) in the nation raising their sales tax this year in order to avoid drastic cuts that would worsen the recession.
The cost of Independence Day
The fireworks are the most visible elements of the celebration on the fourth of July. What is less visible is the existence and role of the government that enables the celebration.
Indeed, the congregation of half a million San Diegans to participate in a public event is no ordinary feat. And there is government on display in no ordinary way. There are police patrols by foot, scooter, bike, motorcycle, ATV, car, boat and choppers, courtesy of the San Diego Police Department. There are almost two hundred lifeguards, emergency vehicles, and fire engines, courtesy of San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
A DROP in the bucket
The city attorney’s opinion itself is a legal question mark. His argument is that the majority of an electoral membership, rather than the majority who voted in an election, is required to pass something. If we held our politicians and propositions to that standard, democracy would grind to a halt. The “yes” votes on Prop 13 (People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation) constituted only 43% of all registered voters, in an election in which voter turnout was 69%. In the revisionist Goldsmithian logic, Proposition 13 in 1978 that is the root cause of our statewide fiscal distress, never passed.
Auditor dives into public pools
When I lived in North Park, I often walked by the Bud Kearns Memorial pool that is nestled in a convenient location in the Morley Field area, north of Balboa Park. It is an old building, probably one of the oldest pools in the city. Its glistening, heated water never fails to attract children playing nearby, youth in the fields, or joggers, strollers and picnic-goers in the periphery of Balboa Park. It is a charming edifice of facilities provided by the city in an accessible price-range: one of the few refuges in the heat of a penny-pinching summer. There are a variety of programs from water-polo to water-fitness offered here. Local swimming competitions, red-cross training, and swimming lessons make it bubbling with activity.
The mayor’s political weapons
The Mayor is taking a $6,000 cut, after giving himself a $65,000 raise.
Remember that last year, the Mayor was drawing a salary of $35,000. After he was re-elected Mayor on December 8th, he awarded himself a raise, without so much as squeaking to the press, whilst parks and libraries were being shut down. Now he announces a 6 percent cut to the world. Here is my calculation assuming the annual salary points at the beginning of the fiscal years:
$35,000 (2008 salary) + $65,000 (2008 raise) – $6,000 (2009 cut) = $94,000 (2009 salary)
Difference between July 2009 and July 2008 salary = +$59,000
