Should We Put A Sales Tax On The Ballot This Fall?

Monday night (June 8th), the City Council will once again discuss the possibility of putting a sales tax on the ballot in November. I still don’t expect us to pull the trigger on this yet, but it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll do it.

At first blush this might seem like a crazy thing to do. After all, we’re in the middle of the worst recession in decades. Nobody wants to pay more taxes. And people are skeptical of government spending – the state measures all got creamed a couple of weeks ago.

But here’s the reality: We’ve already cut more than $11 million from our budget – that’s well north of 10%. We’ve eliminated more than 40 jobs. We’re dipping into reserves already to maintain current levels of police and fire services. Wright Library is at risk to be closed – perhaps permanently. We’re cutting way back on maintaining our parks.

And we’re not done yet. The state is threatening to “borrow” close to $3 million in property tax from us, and we might also lose our gas tax money, which is the major source of funds for paving streets.

The news from Sacramento will continue to get worse and many of our revenue sources will continue to be placed at risk. So I think it comes down to this: We can find more local revenue sources and control our own destiny or we can put ourselves at the mercy of Sacramento. That’s not a tough choice to me.

Of course, there are lots of ways to raise revenue besides raising taxes, and we must pursue them aggressively. But none of them will generate lots more money in the short run, and none of them will generate the amount of money we need to maintain our vital services.

Last spring, our blue-ribbon citizen committee recommended a four-year sunset on the sales tax. This makes sense to me. It will get us through this tough economic time, and it will also ensure accountability because a majority of the City Council will serve the same term.

In addition, I think we need to make a sales-tax ballot measure part of a broader effort to maintain our solvency, our public services, and our quality of life in a tough economy – especially if it sunsets in four years. Therefore, I believe that if the City Council places the sales tax on the ballot, we should do so as part of a larger strategy that contains five points:

1. Spend additional tax revenue only on vital services

We know what the core services are to our community. They’re things like police protection, fire and emergency medical response service, libraries, paving the streets, and keeping our water and beaches clean. If we put a sales tax on the ballot that requires only a simple majority vote to adopt it, the money can’t be earmarked in a legally binding way. But my colleagues and I can – and should -- commit ourselves to spending the money only on these vital public services.


2. Increase tax revenue without increasing tax rates

Practically speaking, this means bringing in more retail stores that generate more sales tax – as well as some other development projects (such as industrial and office development as well as high-end housing) that produce more tax revenue than expenses. This is a long-term effort that will require a lot of work on a lot of fronts, because there is no magic bullet here. (Wal-Mart, for example, would likely generate a net increase of between $500,000 and $700,000 in sales tax – a healthy chunk but a drop in the bucket compared to $11 million in cuts.) We must follow through on all of our action items from the Economic Development Summit in May; we must target and aggressively pursue the retailers we want; and we must continue to clean up our planning process so that projects we want can be approved more quickly.


3. Increase revenue from other sources besides taxes

The city provides a wide variety of services to applicants or individuals who benefit directly from those services – for example, somebody who wants to add a room to their house or somebody who takes a recreation program – as well as services that mostly benefit one group of people (for example, hillside weed abatement). In the last couple of years, we have moved more and more toward “full cost recovery” for these services – that is, having those who benefit pay rather than all the taxpayers. I agree with Councilmember Andrews that we must make a conscious effort to decide which of these services we believe should be paid for by those who benefit, and which should be subsidized by the city’s General Fund.

This can be a controversial exercise. Every time we propose creating or increasing fees for those who benefit, that constituency turns out in opposition to it, so we often back off. But that means we spend more money on those services out of the General Fund – leaving less for police, fire, libraries, potholes, and the rest.


4. Restrain future cost increases

Since we can’t count on the same level of economic growth over the next few years that we have seen in the past, we are going to have to work toward restraining future cost increases in all areas. We’ve already done this in many ways, ranging from eliminating positions to contracting out tree-trimming. We may have to do more. And the big unknown in this arena is our employee pensions. When the stock market drops – like now -- the city has to pay more money to cover the pensions of retired employees. Some of my colleagues would like to address the question of pension reform (for future employees only) now. I agree that the pension question is an important one that we must start looking at.


5. Save for a rainy day

Some 15 years ago, our predecessors wisely set up a reserve fund equal to 25% of the General Fund – enough to run the city for three months in the event of a natural disaster. Since then, we have maintained the same amount in reserves -- $12 million – but we have not increased that reserve proportionately with the General Fund. Right now that’s about 15% of the General Fund. We should consider retaining a bigger reserve fund – permanently held at between 15% and 25%. This could be simply a council policy or we could put it on the ballot as a charter amendment. We would also have to decide what the rainy day fund is for – just natural disasters or financial crises as well?

I am not sure how tomorrow’s council discussion will go. But this is what I would like to see, and I will work toward a consensus along these lines.

I’m Committed to Serving Ventura

For the last couple of months, I have been thinking about entering the race for 35th Assembly district next year. That’s the seat currently held by Pedro Nava, who will be termed out in 2010. There are already two candidates for the Democratic nomination – Das Williams and Susan Jordan, both of whom are from Santa Barbara.

I thought maybe Ventura deserved a candidate too, and I thought I could do a good job serving our region in the Assembly. I’ve lived in this area for more than 20 years, I know Santa Barbara as well as Ventura quite well, I’m familiar with the most basic issues we face, and I know that the rules of the game that we all must live with are set up in Sacramento. These all seemed like good reasons to consider running.

Well, I’ve decided against it. I’m not going to run for the Assembly this time around. There are a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that I want to be able to focus on my job as your City Councilmember and Deputy Mayor.

Eighteen months ago, my colleagues granted me the privilege of serving in a leadership position on the Council as Deputy Mayor. If my colleagues continue to support me, I hope to continue in a leadership position for the next couple of years. My time as Deputy Mayor has reinforced the idea that leadership on the Council is an awful lot [asj1] of work. It requires constant interaction and base-touching with my colleagues and constituents, keeping tabs on tons of issues, and working closely with others to make sure we are “ahead of the curve” and moving important issues along.

This level of leadership and involvement is going to be really critical here in Ventura during the next few years. Because of the downturn in the economy, tax revenue is down a lot[asj2] , and that means all of the services we value here in Ventura are at risk: public safety, emergency response, libraries, road paving, parks and recreation, bus and rail service. It will be a tough slog over the next couple of years to maintain these services and build our tax base for the future so we can ensure our continuing quality of life. I know this may sound kind of weird, considering times are so bad, but I am excited about this challenge. It’s tough times like this that make you realize why you want to serve the public—to help navigate through both good times and bad.

This requires a strong and deep commitment on the part of your City Councilmembers – a commitment to work hard every day to help Ventura get through this tough period and lay the foundation for a prosperous and livable future. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I don’t think anybody can make the necessary commitment if they are running for another office.

If I were to run for the Assembly, I would be distracted. I would not be able to devote my time to the interests of my constituents in Ventura. Frankly, I would have to view everything I do as your Deputy Mayor and City Councilmember through the political lens of whether it would help me or hurt me as an Assembly candidate. I may not always be able to speak or act with the best interests of the citizens of Ventura in mind. That’s not something I would feel good about.

I wouldn’t rule out running for the Assembly or some other office sometime in the future – but I’m not going to do it now. I’ve also decided not to endorse either Das or Susan at his time. Both are good people, but I am just beginning to think of them as possible Assemblymembers and I’d like to talk to them more before I decide whether to endorse either of them. Susan is an environmental activist who runs the California Coastal Protection Network; she’s also married to Assemblymember Nava. Das is a member of the Santa Barbara City Council and also works part-time here in Ventura for CAUSE, a local society equity advocacy group.

To all of you, I want to say thanks for bearing with me, and, although times are tough, I am very excited about working with you to help make Ventura a better place in the years ahead.

Comment Function Enabled!

I've finally figured out Blogger's comment function to enhance interaction on this blog. To comment, click the title of the blog entry, which should direct you to a new page related only to that blog post and a section where you can comment on that post. Thanks for your patience!

The Economic Summit

Ventura often gets a tagged for being a great place to live and a bad place to do business. But quality of life and prosperity don’t have to conflict with each other. Yesterday morning, more than a hundred community leaders gathered at City Hall for our first-ever “Economic Summit” – organized jointly by the City and the Chamber of Commerce.

I’m happy to report that the energy in the room was extremely positive. In fact, it was one of the most productive sessions of this type I’ve ever seen. Everybody in the room participated in breakout sessions dealing with different topics – the city’s own fiscal health, improving the business climate, retaining businesses, and so forth – and came back at the end of the morning with suggestions for how we as a community should move forward. Then the City Council took quick action to pursue some of the highest-priority items.

The starting point was the 2005 Economic Development Strategy – a document adopted by the city council to provide priorities for the city’s economic development efforts. These priorities included focusing on the auto center and the McGrath property, as well as figuring out how we can attract more high-wage jobs to Ventura in the future.

Biotech Opportunities And CMH

I spent most of the morning with the group dealing with business retention. It was a great group of about 10 or 15 people, and actually we wound up debating not just how to retain businesses in town, but also how to position the city better to attract startups and growing companies – especially in the high-tech and biotech sectors.

We’ve been talking for a number of years about the fact that Ventura is surrounded by one of the nation’s richest environments for high-tech and biotech startup companies. We’ve got UC Santa Barbara and a lot of venture capitalists to the north of us, and Amgen and some of the most important biotech activity in the nation to the south of us. A lot of the people who work in these businesses already live in Ventura – and many more find Ventura an attractive and (believe it or not) affordable alternative to places like Thousand Oaks and Santa Barbara.

We’ve tried to market Ventura as the place “where the digital coast meets the technology corridor.” In fact, though, we’re the place where the digital coast almost but doesn’t quite meet the technology corridor. Over the past couple of years, however, the city’s been able to take a couple of very important steps toward remedying this problem. We’ve partnered with a Santa Barbara venture capital firm in order to connect startup businesses with the folks who have money; and we’ve created a high-tech business incubator in the building behind City Hall to give some of these entrepreneurs a place to start out.

But at the breakout group on business retention, another urgent issue came up – the fact that biotech companies have particular space needs that are expensive and hard to come by. In particular, they need “wet lab” space, which require special plumbing and sterilization. At the business retention breakout group, two people I’d never met before – Colby Allen from Amgen (who lives downtown and rode his bike) and Theresa Hoenes from Fisher Scientific – talked about the great opportunities available to us in Ventura if we can create the right kind of space for high-tech and biotech companies. Amgen, for example, will sometimes fund outside folks as they develop a new product. Many of those folks would love Ventura (or live here already) but there’s no place for them to go.

This is where Community Memorial Hospital comes in. CMH is planning a big expansion that should open in 2013. The expansion is driven by the fact that CMH, like other hospitals in the state, must do a seimic retrofit. Patient rooms and surgeries would be moved to a new building, opening up CMH’s old building for other uses – like wet labs.

So I came away from Saturday’s summit convinced that the biggest change since 2005 is the opportunity that CMH provides – and the urgent need to move forward in partnership with biotech companies, venture capitalists, the hospital, entrepreneurs and many others to take advantage of a great opportunity that is on our doorstep.


Getting People Involved – And Working Together As Partners

The most remarkable thing about Saturday’s summit was the turnout. As I said, there were more than a hundred people there – and many of them were business and community leaders that I’d never met before. The Chamber of Commerce deserves enormous credit for the turnout – and the Chamber and our city staff together deserve credit for putting together a format that allowed a lot of creativity to flow out of the breakout groups. That gave us on the City Council a quick way to move on some of these great ideas.

The summit was a great model for how to get the public directly involved in setting – and implementing – the priorities of our community. I think we’ve gotten a justifiable rap in the last couple of years for being a little remote and not engaging the public as much as we should. But I’m proud to say that we’ve begun to turn that around in the last few months. Our task force on view protection – which presented its final recommendations to the City Council on April 6th – drew rave reviews even from Ventura Citizens Organized for Responsible Development (VCORD), the sponsor of next fall’s view initiative. Our blue-ribbon committee on the possibility of a sales tax also did a very good job of sorting through the issues, even though they had only a few weeks to do it. Now we can add the Economic Summit to this growing list of public involvement successes.

But we have to work together to do as well as plan. The weirdest part of Saturday was when we climbed back up on the dais and were suddenly separated again from everybody else – a group of elected officials far distant from a hundred constituents. Too often, the way things work in Ventura is that we do not work collaboratively with constituents and organizations in town. They come to our council meetings and ask us to solve their problems and fund their solutions – and, of course, we can’t do that in every case. The more we step down off the dais and work together with everybody else, the more likely we all are to succeed as a community.


Dealing With Landowners And Developers

And a clarifying post-script: Inevitably, issues about land use planning and development arose, and we heard the usual array of concerns about how our planning process works. Some of these concerns are valid (a recurring theme about the planning process is a lack of “customer service” – meaning, among other things, staff members who aren’t always clear or responsive or even friendly).

From the dais (again, separated from constituents!), I tried to address these concerns, but I didn’t do a very good job of it. What I was trying to say is that we have to be careful to separate out the concerns of people who have a legitimate gripe from those who don’t.

As I have said for several years, we have to decide what we want and what we don’t want and then make it easy for developers to give us what we want and difficult to give us what we don’t want. This is harder than it sounds.

A lot of developers complain that they are stuck in our planning process too long. Often, this is the case – and we owe it to those applicants to give them a quick decision about whether their projects are going to pass must with the city. Sometimes, however, applicants are trying to build projects that do not conform to our planning policies, which have usually been together after lengthy public discussion. We owe them a quick “no” – but developers sometimes have a hard time hearing no, and sometimes they are kicking around our planning process for a long time trying to figure out how to get us to change our minds. What I was trying to say was that we owe it to them – and to our constituents – to stick to our guns and make it clear that we are not going to lower our standards for applicants who want us to violate our own policies.

Similarly, I think we have to understand that there is sometimes a difference, as I was more or less accurately quoted in the paper as saying, between the short-term financial interests of landowners and the long-term prosperity of our community. Landowners often want to maximize the value of their land today by selling to today’s high bidder. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that yet another fast-food joint – or whoever can pay the highest price today – will help us achieve the enduring prosperity we all want, with good jobs and increasing community wealth that can help to maintain our city’s high quality of life. Again, my point was, let’s not lower the bar.

My Earth Day

It had been a carbon-intensive couple of weeks – those two weeks leading up to the Earth Day celebration in Ventura. Between Friday, April 3rd, and Wednesday, April 15th, I drove back and forth to San Diego, then took Metrolink to Los Angeles and back, then drove to downtown Los Angeles and then out by LAX and then back, then driven out to Ontario and Upland and back, then out to Riverside and back. So as Earth Day approached, it was pretty clear that I had to turn down the volume on my “carbon footprint” or else I was in big trouble.

There are a lot of factors that affect your carbon footprint, but the biggest one is traveling in vehicles that burn fossil fuels. Driving increases your carbon footprint significantly (buses and trains less so, but that’s still fossil fuel being burned). Our new state regulations for greenhouse gas emissions are promoting the idea that every household in California should only drive about 14,000 miles a year – that’s less than 300 a week, or a little over 40 a day. Yikes. And the experts will tell you that flying in an airplane balloons your footprint more than anything else. Double yikes.

I got serious about this on Thursday, April 16th. I had to go to Los Angeles and back again. This time, I took Metrolink again to Downtown L.A., where I had an appointment. Then I took the Red Line to connect up with a shuttle bus down to the University of Southern California, where I bummed a ride back to Ventura – in a Prius that had a total of five people in it. So far so good.

On Friday the 17th, I drove to work from my house near Ventura High School, met some friends downtown, and drove back to my house. Grand total: 5 miles. In my Prius.

Then I got serious. On Saturday the 18th, I wanted to go to the beach cleanup and the Ecofestival, both down along the Promenade. I managed to ride my bike. I decided not to go to the market – I ate out of my freezer instead – and I was too lazy to drive over to Mavericks Gym to work out, even though I intended to. I did drive back downtown to meet a friend for a drink. Two more miles, for a total of seven in two days.

Sunday the 19th: Again too lazy to go to the gym. Rode my bike over to the Midtown Earth Day event near my house. Drove to the office to catch up on some work, then home. More freezer food. Four miles – and 11 miles total in three days. Though, admittedly, I was chewing up frozen food assets to avoid driving to the market.

Then came Monday the 20th, and it began to get a little trickier. My typical Monday schedule is: go to work, then have lunch with Mayor Christy Weir and a couple of city folks, return to work for a little while. After that, prep for the City Council meeting by going to Mavericks for an intense workout (only way I can sit still on Monday nights), then back home for a nap before heading over to City Hall for the Council meeting, which starts at 6 (or 5 if we have a closed session to discuss litigation or personnel matters).

So I rode my bike to work, then walked to lunch, then walked back to the office, and rode my bike home. I was determined not to drive out to the gym, so I rode my bike around Midtown doing errands – the dry cleaners (dropoff, not pickup), the bike store, the bank, and the shoe repair store. All surprisingly easy. A touch over a half-hour altogether.

This allowed me to persuade myself that I didn’t need to go to the gym. So I took a nap and reviewed the council material, then took good old Gold Coast Transit Route 6 down Main Street, had a brief dinner in the back room at City Hall, and then sat in my chair on the dais for seven hours while the Council dealt with a variety of lengthy issues, including Wal-Mart.

As of 1 a.m., I had driven zero miles that day, and only 11 for a 4-day period. But I was at City Hall with no ride home. So I bummed a ride with Rick Cole, the City Manager, who lives near me – which reminded me that bumming rides is an essential component of lowering your carbon footprint. (At least he has a hybrid car too, but still, I’m mooching off of his carbon footprint.)

Tuesday the 21st – the day before the official Earth Day – was the day it all began to unravel. I had fretted about this one for a while, because I had a meeting downtown at 7 p.m. Should I take the bus or ride my bike to work and then walk to the meeting and walk home? Should I just drive? I tossed and turned the night before.

I finally decided to ride my bike to work, then walk to a series of two meetings in the late afternoon at City Hall, then walk back to the office – and after that I wasn’t sure, except I didn’t have my car with me. I would get back home somehow.

Everything went fine until I got to City Hall at 4 o’clock, when I realized that the two meetings were not at City Hall, as I had thought, but at the Chamber of Commerce office on Victoria near Telephone. I panicked, but Rick Cole again bailed me out by giving me a ride. I met him down at Ben & Jerry’s, where he was joining his kids on free ice cream cone day. I had a cone, thus regretting my missed trips to the gym, and then we drove out to the Chamber – arriving just in time for me to miss almost all of the first meeting.

Then the second meeting started – a planning meeting for the joint City Council-Chamber of Commerce economic summit scheduled for this upcoming Saturday, May 2nd, at 9 a.m. When it started, we realized that we were planning what was going to happen at an official City Council meeting, and there were four council members in the room (Mayor Weir, Ed Summers ,Jim Monahan, and me) – a majority. This held the potential to violate the Brown Act, the state’s open meetings law, so I stepped out of the meeting.

And had no way to get back downtown until that meeting broke up.

I fiddled around checking email for a few minutes, then went over to the Ventura County Transportation Commission next door, where I informed Darren Kettle, the executive director, that he had little choice but to give me an unscheduled briefing on what was going on. We shot the breeze till around 5:30, when I went back to the Chamber and bummed yet another ride with Rick Cole.

I was still fretting about how to get from my night meeting to home without a car when I realized Rick was getting off the freeway not at California but at Seaward. He was going not to City Hall but home. When he dropped me off at my house, the situation was that although I had driven no miles that day, now my car was at home, my bike was at the office – and I had a meeting elsewhere downtown at 7.

Now I had to make a choice. Do I drive back downtown? Do I leave the bike at the office and ride it home tomorrow? That lead to the second thing I was fretting about – the fact that I had another meeting out on Victoria the next afternoon (a very busy day) and I didn’t think I had the time – or the inclination – to ride my bike out there and back.

In the end, I drove to the office, put the bike in the back of the car (which required taking the front wheel off), drove home, unloaded the bike, drove back downtown for my meeting, and drove home. Seven miles – bringing my four-day total to 18.

The next day – Wednesday, April 22nd, the actual Earth Day – I stopped worrying about things. I drove to work, drove out to my meeting on Victoria, drove back to the office, and drove home. That was 16 miles, almost doubling my total for the week.

Still, 34 miles driven, one bus ride, and three bummed car rides is pretty good for a five-day total. Which was a good things because of what happened the nexy day, Thursday the 23rd. I began by going to the cleaners and the bank (cleaning too bulky to carry on a bike), then driving to a meeting at the Harbor (about seven miles total), then back to the office (about six more miles). Then I drove to USC to teach my urban planning class (about 70 miles, but there was a traffic jam and I outsmarted myself in the traffic jam by trying a workaround which failed, adding five more miles). After that, I drove to LAX (another 12 miles) and flew to Oakland.

At 10:30 that night I was standing outside the Oakland Airport facing the possibility of riding a bus to the BART station, then BART to Berkeley, and then walking a half-mile to my hotel at 11:30 at night in order to keep my carbon footprint down. But I'd already put in a hundred miles of driving and one airplane flight in a single day, so my carbon footprint was already blown.

That was when I decided Earth Day was over and hailed a cab.

Victoria Avenue and Wal-Mart

Last Monday night, the City Council adopted the long-awaited new Victoria Corridor Plan and Code. The intent of this code – which covers property along Victoria between the 126 and 101 Freeways – is to encourage a long-term transition along Victoria toward high-quality office uses.

In laying down the rules for this new generation of development, the code also seeks to move Victoria toward better urban design – so that the people who work in these office jobs can walk from one building to another, or to nearby retail, in a pleasant environment. The idea is to encourage high-end office-based businesses to move to – or stay in – the Victoria setting.

All these goals are in our General Plan, which the City Council adopted in 2005. Part of the impetus is to ensure that the Victoria corridor in the future can compete with the towers in Oxnard for high-end office tenants – an enormously important issue, in my opinion. But this larger concern has, of course, have been overshadowed by the Wal-Mart issue.

Wal-Mart has a lease on the old Kmart site by Trader Joe’s and currently has a propose to occupy the old building that housed Kmart and other businesses – 130,000 square feet in all. In the end, the council held the line by limiting individual stores to 100,000 square feet – but also permitted modernization, including new loading docks, for existing buildings.

This means Wal-Mart will be able to move into the old Kmart store if the giant retailer is willing to reduce its store footprint to 100 000 square feet.

Even though most of the discussion about the modernization issues was about Wal-Mart, there’s a larger issue here: how much is the city willing to push the owners of retail land to get them to redevelop their property over the next 10 to 20 years? The answer, thanks to the modernization rules adopted Monday night, is not much.

I voted for the code and against the modernization rules. My rationale for voting against the modernization rules had largely to do with Wal-Mart. In my opinion, if the largest retailer in the world wants to come into Ventura, we should hold them to a very high standard. The modernization rules lowered the bar for Wal-Mart.

In explaining my reasoning on this issue, let me begin by saying that, although I don’t much like Wal-Mart, I like the idea of using land use regulations to keep Wal-Mart out of town even less.

People don’t like Wal-Mart for many reasons, but most of the criticism that we heard Monday night – as we have heard for the last three years – has to do with their labor practices. Much of the opposition to Wal-Mart comes from people who fear that the company’s presence in Ventura will undercut unionized chain supermarkets such as Vons and Ralphs, which pay more than non-unionized Wal-Mart.

Throughout California, these folks have attempted to use land use regulation to keep Wal-Mart out of town. In some cases (like Los Angeles), this has worked. In other cases (like Atascadero) this hasn’t worked. And looming over this whole issue in Ventura is the fact that the anti-Wal-Mart forces have qualified an initiative for the ballot in November. This initiative would not keep Wal-Mart out of town, but it would prohibit any retail business of more than 90,000 square feet from selling groceries. In general, I think it's very difficult to try to use land-use regulations to deal with concerns about a business's labor practices.

My position on the Wal-Mart proposal has been pretty consistent: I’m concerned that a gigantic Wal-Mart Supercenter (these are typically 150,000 to 180,000 square feet) would undermine the Ralphs/Long shopping center across the street and generate too much traffic on Victoria. That’s why I have consistently supported the 100,000 square feet restriction. (Actually, I proposed 90,000 square feet but went along with 100,000).

Back in February, when we were supposed to adopt the code, my colleagues kicked it back to the staff one more time. The concern was that the code would render virtually all buildings along Victoria as “non-conforming” – meaning they could not be expanded or changed much. The council directed the planners to come up with a way of permitting some modernization of nonconforming buildings. I agree that this is a legitimate concern, but I feared that the direction to the staff (proposed by my colleague Neal Andrews) was too broad.

When the code came back to us the other night, it came back with a proposal to allow nonconforming buildings to modernize in a variety of ways – to expand their footprint slightly, to add “greening” (for example, upgrading the HVAC system), to add a new entrance – and, most importantly for the anti-Wal-Mart folks, to add new loading docks. Wal-Mart has asked for new loading docks.

Most of the 30 speakers on Monday night asked us to take the loading dock section out of the code, specifically to block Wal-Mart. A few of the speakers – including the manager of Victoria Village, where the 99 Cent Store is located – said that without the modernization provisions property owners would not be able to upgrade their properties to stay viable in the next decade or so.

As I said Monday night, the modernization provisions presented the Council with a difficult choice:

-- If we accepted the modernization provisions, we would make it easier for many retail businesses up and down Victoria to update their properties and continue their retail uses without redeveloping the property under the code. But we would also be allowing Wal-Mart to move into the Kmart building with minimal changes, assuming they could stay within 100,000 square feet.

-- If we rejected the modernization provisions and adopted the code as originally proposed, we would make it more difficult for the retail businesses to update – but we would “raise the bar” for Wal-Mart, forcing them to go through the entire planning approval process, follow the urban design principles contained in the code, and probably build an extremely “green” building.

In the end, Brian Brennan and I chose to vote for the latter course – and everybody else went the other way. I understand the concerns about other property owners, but to me we blew the opportunity to use the Wal-Mart project as a way to kick-start the new code. I was quoted, accurately, in the Star as saying, that our decision will “allow one of the richest corporations in the world to move into a crappy building with minimal improvements,”

The larger issue, however, is whether or not we undermined our own code with these modernization provisions. Our stated long-term goal – in the General Plan and in the Victoria Corridor Plan – is to facilitate a transition away from large retail and single-use developments toward a high-end office environment with some mixed use. Now we’ve decided that owners of existing buildings that don’t conform with that vision can modernize anytime in the next 10 years and stay in place for as long as they want after that.

I hope we can go back at some point in the future and tighten up these modernization provisions, so that landowners are not completely hamstrung but are encouraged to redevelop their property in conformance with the code.

Talk City

The other day, Ross Olney – who is, shall we say, a frequent commentator on local affairs – complimented my colleagues and I on making the tough budget decisions. At least I think it was a compliment. In a letter to the editor in the Star , Ross wrote that he was glad to see that, after months of hand-wringing, we had finally figured out that the best way to eliminate a budget deficit is to cut costs.

“Wow! A spending cut!” Ross wrote. “Why didn’t the rest of us think of that? … Although some of us wonder why they didn’t do these things months ago, it is good to see how smart we were to have elected our current council

The truth of the matter is that we haven’t actually done most of the budget-cutting yet. We’ve been talking about it for a couple of months now, and we’ve trimmed a few things around the edges. But we’re going headlong into the serious budget-cutting discussion tonight and it’s likely to slop over until a week from Monday, March 30th (a fifth Monday, which would typically have off).

So what has taken us so long? Partly, the answer is that we do a lot more hand-wringing than we have to. But partly the answer is that Ventura really is Talk City. Not only do we do a lot of talking before we act on anything, but so does everybody else – our city manager, our department heads, the Chamber of Commerce, neighborhood leaders, gadflies, cranky constituents, supportive constituents, and everybody who gets money or some other benefit from the City treasury, including the police union, the fire union, SEIU (the union that represents all other city workers), library advocates, arts advocates, developers, bloggers, prospective council candidates, and even, for example, our city’s graphics department employees, who have come up with a number of creative ways to save money so they don’t get laid off.

And that’s one of the things that I love about being on the City Council in Ventura. Everybody’s got an opinion. Nobody’s afraid to express that opinion. We talk about things forever. And in the process of doing so, we gradually reach a consensus about what to do – a consensus that will be much more likely to “stick” because of all the talking.

I think it’s also worth pointing out that we’ve tried to be up-front about our budget problems from the beginning – and, since no deed goes unpunished, the result is that we often get hammered for being fiscally irresponsible. Back around New Year’s, for example, the Star wrote a story about each city’s budget situation. We were pretty honest about how things stood, and, frankly, the other cities underplayed the problem. Now everybody else is finally acknowledging that they are in the same boat. Oxnard’s going to have a budget deficit the same size as ours – even though they passed a sales tax last fall. I’m glad we’re honest about what’s up. I’ll take Talk City over the alternative any day.

Just to set the record straight, I think it’s worth noting that the city is in much better fiscal shape now than it was when I was elected in 2003 – and we’re having a high-profile discussion about how to cut the budget because we’re trying to maintain solvency, not dig ourselves out of a hole.

As long ago as 2001, the city acknowledged a “structural” deficit – meaning, basically, that the city was running in the red every year and plugging holes with reserves and other money. When we hired Rick Cole as city manager in 2004, he set a goal of eliminating the structural deficit in three years. Partly due to strong growth in property tax revenues, we did it in two.

And last year, when we first faced budget problems because of the slumping economy, we cut $4 million off the budget in the middle of the year to maintain a balanced budget. We have so far resisted the temptation of dipping into reserves to run the city – something that government agencies are usually all too quick to do in bad times.

A number of folks have recently suggested that we have gone begging to the public with the P6 sales tax in 2006 and the failed 911 fee in 2008 because we’re broke and we don’t know how to manage our money. In fact, we’re not broke. We have sought these new sources of revenue so that we can expand our public safety force – something we hadn’t done since 1990 (at least until last year).

So tonight and next week, when you watch a lot of people ask us to protect their programs –arts grants, graphics employees, public art, the roving fire engine -- hold us accountable by paying attention not just to what the public speakers say, but to what we actually do and how much we actually cut. It’s going to hurt, but it will keep us solvent.

In the long run, I think this will be a good conversation for Talk City – because it will force us to think about what the City really can pay for, and what ought to be funded other ways. There’s always been a bias in this town – the City should initiate everything, drive everything, and fund everything. But that’s not sustainable.

A decade ago, when I was involved in the city’s visioning effort, we recommended that a wide-ranging group of community leaders and organizations work together to create a broader-based and more sustainable effort at funding all of our community programs. That way, we all work together and take responsibility for keeping things going, instead of having everybody come on Monday night and complain that the City’s not paying for everything.

Things haven’t quite worked out the way we envisioned at the time. But we’ve made good progress. Many of our nonprofits are much more successful and in better financial shape than they were in those days. Many more have been successfully “hatched,” sometimes with City seed money. I’m hopeful that the current budget crisis will move us farther down this road – so the entire community can pitch in and figure out how to get things done, rather than simply coming to us on Monday nights and begging.