Why I've Decided Not To Run Again

Eight years ago, I stood on the steps of City Hall and announced that I was running for the City Council. Today I am writing to let you know that I have decided to step down and not run for a third term this fall. It’s been a great ride – I love being on the City Council, and I especially love being Mayor. I am very grateful that you have given me the opportunity to serve you.

When I made the decision to run eight years ago, it wasn’t because I wanted to be a career politician, either by “moving up the food chain” to higher office or “being somebody” locally by occupying a seat on the City Council forever. I ran because I wanted to work with the community on some very specific changes that I believed were needed to move Ventura in a positive direction – ensuring long-term prosperity, conserving our open space and improving our downtown and our neighborhoods, maintaining and improving public safety, and most of all opening up City Hall so that our city government could be more transparent and accountable to the people it serves.

After two terms in office – including one stint as mayor and another as deputy mayor –I’m proud of the positive changes we have made. The “growth wars” of the ‘90s and early ‘00s are mostly behind us. We have far more stability in our city’s leadership than we used to. City Hall is, indeed, far more open and transparent than it used to be, and we are engaged in many more partnerships with the community at large.

Most important, we’ve dealt responsibly with a major financial crisis – one that nobody anticipated when I first ran back in 2003. Although we have had to cut services more than I would have liked, we took swift, early action to maintain a balanced budget. That’s why we do not face the deep financial problems currently confronting many of our surrounding cities.

I haven’t accomplished everything I set out to do, but I am proud to have done my share to help move things forward in many positive ways over the past eight years; and anyway no elected office-holder ever accomplishes every goal. It’s important to have experience and stability on the council, and during my time we’ve had both – a big change from the ‘90s and early ‘00s, when there was a lot of turnover. But I never intended to serve more than two terms, and I do sometimes worry that I will get stale in office.

I have to admit that personal considerations play an important role in this decision. I had a rich and fulfilling life before politics – professional, civic, personal -- and I am looking forward to focusing more on all of those activities again. In particular, I believe it is necessary for me to focus far more attention on my personal health, especially the ongoing loss of my eyesight.

As I revealed in a blog more than a year ago, I suffer from a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, a deterioration of the retina that is gradually diminishing my peripheral vision and night vision. There is no way to know how quickly RP will rob anyone of their eyesight; and there is no treatment or cure. Anybody who has spent time with me in the last couple of years knows that this condition is becoming worse and that I am struggling to adjust to it. But the demands on my time as mayor have prevented me from focusing on how to make the transition to living life as a low-vision person. For my own well-being and the well-being of those I love, it is time for me to focus more fully on making this transition successfully.

In many ways, it is hard to leave office at such a difficult time. Over the past few years, we have had to cut our service levels to a point that most of us on the council are not comfortable with. We have been extremely fiscally responsible – moreso than most of our neighbors – but we must begin the effort to restore and reinvent our services, so that we never again have to face the difficult choices we have had to make in the past few years. As the current chair of the Ventura County Transportation Commission, I am working on organizational and service changes for public transit that should benefit the county greatly, and I wish I could see them through. The same is true for libraries. Our libraries have taken a big hit in recent years, and I believe our current library planning process will yield great results. When the real estate market comes back, I believe we will begin to see fabulous new development projects downtown and elsewhere and it would be great to be on the Council when that finally occurs.

But when you’re an incumbent, you can always come up with an excuse to run for office again. It’s much harder to look beyond the office you hold and envision the many other ways you might be able to help your community. In deciding whether to run again, I have thought long and hard about what role I might play once I leave office. Ventura has a long history of community service on the part of retired mayors and councilmembers and I look forward to joining my predecessors in playing that role. Beyond that, I believe that there are now unprecedented opportunities for everyone in the community – former mayor or not – to participate in moving our community forward.

In the old days, a constituency that wanted something – a park, a transportation program, an arts program, a construction project -- simply lobbied the City Council, putting the City on the hook for organizing, planning, funding, and running the whole thing. We as a community can no longer afford to operate this way, and one of the great accomplishments of the last few years has been to partner with others in the community to move things forward. We have, for example, partnered with community nonprofits to keep the downtown senior center open, to plan the future of Grant Park, and to maintain and renew our beloved ArtWalk. The City and the community will be partnering frequently in the future. I hope to work with you in many of these efforts during my five remaining months as mayor -- and in the years ahead after I leave office.

First and foremost is the effort to use our upcoming 150th anniversary in 2016 as a “target” to improve our community. As I suggested in my State of the City address in February, we are now in the process of creating a community-based committee to discuss what our community’s goals over the next five years should be and how we can achieve those goals.

Beyond the 2016 effort, there are many other ongoing issues in our community that I am really interested in and hope to continue working on. These include our business incubator and Ventura’s “new economy”, transportation and public transit, arts and culture, planning and development, and arts, culture and libraries. And I think it’s a safe bet that I will become more active as and advocate for disabled persons – which, in my mind, is really just a way to advocate to eliminate physical barriers to mobility for all people.

As I said above, no office-holder accomplishes everything he or she sets out to do, and any politician can always come up with an excuse to run again. I view my decision to step down not so much as an end to my involvement in Ventura, but simply as a transition into a different role where I can continue to help make our community better. I love Ventura more than ever, and I will continue to do everything I can to pursue the two goals for Ventura that I have always had – enduring prosperity and a high quality of life. Thanks for the opportunity to serve you on the City Council and as Mayor. I look forward to working with you as mayor between now and December – I promise I will put my foot to the floor to get things done – and I look forward to working with you for many more years to come.

The Tough Slog To Increase Revenue

In tough times, it’s always tempting to think that you can solve all your financial problems by finding some magical way to increase revenue. After all, spending money is always more fun than cutting the budget yet again. But the truth of the matter is that in this economy finding more revenue – especially in a way that doesn’t place an additional burden on our already overburdened taxpayers – is a tough slog.

Last week the City Council held a workshop where we discussed some of the possible ways we might generate more revenue. We talked about everything from “crash taxes” (charging out-of-town people involved in auto accidents) to selling or leasing city property as a way of raising cash to putting another proposed sales tax increase on the ballot. Not surprisingly, none of these ideas got much traction. But we did talk about range of other ideas – and, in the end, we voted to pursue a few things that seem worth a try, including:

1. Hiring an outside firm to help us make sure all businesses in the city pay business license tax.
2. Conducting on audit of our hotel bed tax collections to ensure all hotels and motels (and vacation rentals) are collecting this tax.
3. Renegotiating city leases to increase revenue where possible.
4. Ramping up efforts to obtain private donations, especially for capital projects in parks and other public locations where naming opportunities exist.
5. Continuing to focus on making our Auto Center a stronger retail destination.
6. Increasing our grant-writing capability.

The truth is that all these efforts won’t generate an enormous amount of money – at least not in the short run. Our best hope for an immediate pop is keeping a closer eye on compliance for business license tax and hotel bed tax.

I know first-hand that many businesses don’t get business licenses – about 20 years ago, I was one of those business owners! And I’m confident that with more compliance, we can increase business license tax revenue by 10-20%. However, that would amount to somewhere between $150,000 and $300,000. That’s a good chunk that will help us, but it’s not going to solve all our problems.

Similarly, it’s pretty clear that some smaller motels and vacation rentals don’t pay hotel bed tax. But most of the big hotels already pay, so we’re talking about a pretty small amount here too.

The other efforts are probably longer term – but we can’t lose sight of them just because we’re hurting now. The Auto Center did well during the boom – at our peak, we had 13 dealerships and the same auto sales as Oxnard – but we’re hurting badly now, mostly because there’s no surrounding retail in Ventura as there is in Oxnard. Even so, most retailers are pulling back on expansion plans now, so it’s unlikely we’ll get anything soon.

And you don’t get big philanthropic gifts for parks and public projects overnight. But we have two good examples in the Pier and the Community Park, both of which have raised more than $1 million in private donations. Just think how reassuring it is to know that if a storm damages the Pier, we have more than $1 million in private funds to draw upon and don’t have to take money away from some other City project! These kinds of donations are going to be really important in the next few years, because we are not going to have General Fund money for capital projects in the parks, as we have in the past.

Although this wasn’t in the motion passed by the Council, I’m also a big advocate of promoting Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions as a way of generating more sales tax for the city. Every business in town buys lots of goods subject to sales tax. If they buy those goods in town, then we get more sales tax. If you look at a map of where our sales tax comes from, you’d be amazed to see how much comes out of the Market/McGrath area – supposedly an industrial area, but in reality a place where many businesses buy products from other businesses. That’s why I was so excited recently when the Chamber’s Young Professionals Group had a mixer that brought together the start-up businesses in our incubator with the young small business owners in town.

And what about tax increases? After losing two sales tax measures recently – one in 2006 and one in 2009 – I have to say I think we’re done with that for now. There are a number of small measures that may have a chance of passage if they were combined into one ballot measure, including an entertainment ticket tax, an increase in the hotel bed tax, and maybe an increase in the Lighting and Landscaping District assessments. (Currently, you don’t pay enough in Lighting and Landscaping assessments to cover the cost of the streetlights, so we have to subsidize that with $400,000 from the General Fund.) But even all put together they won't raise that much money, and I don’t think our voters have any appetite for even these tax increases now.

Over the past three years, as we have struggled to reduce costs and increase revenues, we’ve heard literally hundreds of ideas. We’ve looked at them all, and implemented some of them. But, in general, I’ve found that every idea falls into one of four categories:

1. We’re already doing it.
2. It’s impossible to do for some reason (impractical, illegal).
3. It’s a great idea and we should do it right now, but it will only raise or save a little bit of money.
4. It’s a great idea and it will raise or save a lot of money, but it will take a long time to do it and we won’t see much immediate benefit.

The business license and hotel bed tax compliance efforts fall into category #3. Everything else falls into category #4. My bottom line is this: We’ve done a good job of cutting when we’ve needed to cut during the downturn. Our services have taken a huge hit but we are solvent and shouldn’t have to cut much more. So now is the time to start laying the groundwork for more revenue when the economy begins to perk up. We’ll keep looking at small, painless ways to raise revenue – and we’ll keeping working on long-term efforts to stabilize and improve our revenue base by increasing business generally.

Building Ventura's Enduring Prosperity

Adapted from the Chamber of Commerce State of the City address:

Over the past few weeks, I have talked a lot about the need for Ventura to build a new and enduring prosperity that will last a generation or more. Partly because of the current economic conditions, I’ve gotten a strong and positive response from people in Ventura on the need to rebuild prosperity.

But I’ve also come to realize that prosperity means different things to different people. For a resident who’s a homeowner, it probably means a stable job with a stable income and rising home value. For a local retailer, it means more sales in the cash register. For a business owner, it means rising sales and profits. For the city, it means more revenue and therefore more ability to provide Venturans with the high quality of life they want and deserve.

But to all of us, I think it means the process of building an enduring prosperity – a sense of economic well-being in our community that is durable, widely shared, and can help provide a stable income for most people, tax revenue to provide public services, and philanthropic wealth to endow the future. Achieving this kind of prosperity is not as easy as simply luring a retail store into town or subsidizing an auto dealer. It’s a long-term effort that requires both intensity and focus.

I have spent most of my life trying to understand how cities work, and I can say one thing: whether they grow or increase in population or not, they never stay the same. To prosper – and to maintain a high quality of life – cities have to reinvent themselves economically again and again.

Ventura has already reinvented itself many times -- from mission town to fishing town to agricultural center to oil boomtown to surf town government town – and we remain all these things to some extent today. But we cannot stand still. We must continue to forge ahead, reinvent ourselves – find enduring prosperity in the 21st Century global economy while retaining the small-town feel we all cherish.

When I read over that line – that our little town has to find enduring prosperity in the 21st century global economy – it sounds kind of pompous. After all, we’re just Ventura! But every city, big or small, must find its place in the larger economy, whether that city is in California or Europe or South America or China. That is what we did when we were primarily an oil town, and that is what we did when we were primarily a citrus town. And that is what we must do now.

We must identify our niche and aggressively pursue it, or else we risk the idea of having other people -- from other places -- define who we are.

When most businesses and communities sit down to figure out their future, they chart out different scenarios. They begin what a “business as usual” or “default” scenario, and then they craft a “preferred” scenario. Then they figure out what’s required to get to the future they prefer -- rather than stumble into the future by default.

I think we in Ventura are at a critical moment in understanding what our “default” future might be, and we must take steps collaboratively to counteract that “default” approach and, instead, build a future we really want.

Because the “default” future for us is different from what we have always been. And by working together, we can create a better, more prosperous future that will help pay for our quality of life for many years to come.

Throughout our history, Ventura has always had a proud history of producing things. Oil and citrus are the two most obvious examples, though there are others. The most important point, however, is that we produced things -- we exported them to the world -- and we reaped the benefits of wealth created here locally.

This is not the future that is emerging for Ventura – at least if we do nothing. Our “default” or “business as usual” future does not revolve around producing. It revolves around consuming. Increasingly, the economic base of our community focuses on bringing people into our community – visitors, retirees, and commuters – who bring their money from somewhere else and spend it here.

I want to emphasize that visitors, retirees, and commuters all play an important role here in Ventura. These are robust sectors of our economy. They are important to our local businesses. We value every one of them, and I will talk more in a few minutes about how we can best leverage their presence.

But I want to emphasize that if our future in Ventura consists only of visitors, retirees, and commuters, then we will lose something very precious about Ventura, and we will be giving our future prosperity away on terms that we should not accept.

The single most precious thing about Ventura is that it feels like a small town. This is a ridiculous thing to say, since we are a city of over 100,000 people. Yet we do feel this way, because we all see each other all the time. At work. At school. At the market. And at youth sports activities. Why? Because, far more than the average community, people who live in Ventura also work here. One of my greatest fear is that we will lose this small-town feel as more and more people commute OUT to other places in the morning and more and more people commute IN to Ventura FROM other places in the morning. This is happening more and more. You can feel it.

If we continue with “business as usual,” eventually we will become almost exclusively a community where people who have made their money in other places live and visit. This is good in many ways, I don’t deny that, but it threatens our small-town feel. It will tend to create a two-tier economy with a lot of low-paid service workers, and it will turn Ventura into something we have never been before.

And how do we maintain that small-town feel -- that precious balance? We do it by ensuring that Ventura is still a place where things are produced. A place where the jobs created are filled by people who live here, and a place where the wealth generated here stays here. A community that produces things will spin off related businesses, including suppliers, and will also create better-paying jobs, so there is less risk that a two-tier economy will emerge.

So how do we here in little Ventura do that?

Well, in the 19th Century, we rode the agricultural wave -- and produced food that was exported to the rest of the country and the world.

In the 20th Century, we rode the oil wave -- and produced oil that was exported to the rest of the country and the world.

The 21st Century, on the other hand, will be the century where creativity and innovation drive prosperity, especially here in the United States. We must find our place in this economy, and we must work aggressively and cooperatively to establish ourselves.

Everything we are moving forward with right now on the economic front is focused on exactly this goal – and these efforts are tightly intertwined.

Sometimes, hard-core business people in town criticize us for our commitment to arts and culture. But we’re in that game for a reason: Arts and culture are important as a way to connect to the fast-growing creative and innovation economies regionally and worldwide, which we in Ventura must be a part of in order to prosper in the future.

The creative arts – performance, visual arts, graphic and architectural design, publishing, fashion -- represent one of the fastest-growing sectors of the American economy. No American city will be able to prosper in the future without nurturing these creative arts. The future of the creative arts in Ventura is virtually unlimited – and essential to our future in so many different ways

Over the last year, we have increased our visibility in Hollywood with the Film Ventura! Initiative – kicked off last fall at our downtown movie complex. This effort has reminded us that we have an enormous supply of local film talent here in Ventura – actors, craftspeople, and even many writers and producers. Location shooting is fun to have, but we want high-value-added parts of the entertainment production process as well.

We’ve also strengthened our connection with our most important local educational institution dealing with the creative arts, Brooks Institute. Hundreds of Brooks film and video students already live and work in Ventura, and I recently met with Brooks’s new president, Susan Kirkland, to reaffirm our mutual commitment to each other. Brooks is a critical component of Ventura’s creative economy – attracting talented young people to Ventura and helping us to attract regional and national attention.

The creative economy is important to our future prosperity, but it will not sustain us all by itself. The creative economy is important to Ventura for a much bigger reason as well: It provides us with an important connection to the worldwide innovation economy. The creating of new products and new services – especially using the the Internet – today serves as the engine of the global economy.

No city can prosper in the 21st Century without strong, local innovators. Innovators are themselves creative and they thrive on a lively and creative local community.

That’s why our Ventura Ventures Technology Center on the 3d Floor of 505 Poli Street has been so successful. V2TC is now home to 19 startup companies and more than 50 employees.
The entrepreneurs located there are changing the way the world uses information – through online advertising, geographic location systems, online marketing, and many other innovative ideas. This is the 21st Century equivalent of citrus or oil production. These companies are inventing high-value-added products that will be used throughout the world and, in the process, creating good-paying jobs and wealth that will stay here in Ventura.

They’re drawn to Ventura not just by this incubator but also by the high quality of life, the recreational opportunities, and the creative buzz in our downtown.

The other day I got a Facebook message from one of our downtown restaurant owners, who said that although he was happy we had these fledgling businesses, he believes we need “real” companies that provide lots of jobs. He still feels the loss of Kinko’s, he said.

I understand that concern. But what we’re trying to do at the incubator is work with these entrepreneurs to create the next business that will create 50, or 100, or 500, or 1,000 jobs – and keep all those jobs and all that wealth here in Ventura. And it will happen.

We also know that businesses cannot succeed without startup capital. And local capital is especially important. If we can finance our innovative companies through local sources, then the resulting wealth will stay in our community, to be recycled into yet more business ventures and also providing the basis for local philanthropy.

I’m grateful to our local banks and financial institutions for their commitment to our community. My business has a long relationship with Santa Barbara Bank & Trust. Just as important, however, is the fact that the angel investors and venture capitalists who help the startups and the fledging businesses that are creating and inventing new products have also discovered Ventura. Tech Coast Angels, an investor group, meets regularly in town now to hear “pitches”. The City has a partnership with DFJ Frontier, a venture capital firm, investing in businesses that could pay off here. And recently Peate Ventures – a venture capital firm from Westlake Village – moved to Downtown Ventura and has funded some of the incubator startups.

I am very hopeful the expansion of Community Memorial Hospital will create new opportunities for entrepreneurial activity in the biomed field here in Ventura, as we are located so close to Amgen and other critical biomed players.

This, then, must be our preferred scenario – for Ventura to continue to be a community that produces products and wealth for the rest of the world, just as we have been for 140 years, rather than a place like Santa Barbara, which – beautiful though it is -- simply consumes products and wealth gathered from elsewhere in the world. This kind of prosperity will bring better-paying jobs to Ventura. It will also ensure that the wealth generated here stays here – thus providing our community with an endowment for quality of life, just as the Bards and the Fosters once endowed our community with institutions and parks that we still enjoy every day.

Now, you may have gotten the idea that I think we shouldn’t focus on visitors and retirees and commuters, and if you’re in the real estate business or the hospitality business that probably scares you. But that’s not really what I meant to convey. My point is not that we shouldn’t pursue those folks, but that we need to leverage their presence in helping to rebuild Ventura as a town that produces things.

Every visitor and every retiree is a potential investor in some new business in Ventura. I’ve seen this time and time again – they come here and they like it, and the next thing you know they are moving their business here or creating a new one. That’s a great thing. And every commuter weary of driving to L.A. or Santa Barbara is a potential entrepreneur – eager to build their dreams here in Ventura and help us build ours.

My point here is that we tend to view bringing these folks into town as an end in itself – a way to generate hotel bed nights or real estate sales. What we really need to do is view these efforts as an economic development tool – to help promote Ventura as a place where entrepreneurs and investors can find the ecosystem they need to thrive.

And if you’re in a business-to-business service business – as so many Chamber members are – you’ll be winners if we’re successful too. Helping startups – and then helping them when their big – is an important task, and we must have all those support services in place to succeed. If our producer companies grow, we all win. Many people have good jobs. Our nonprofit and community organizations have lots of donors. And the city has enough tax revenue to provide the public safety, street paving, and other services everyone needs and wants.

So let’s work together to build Ventura’s prosperity for another generation!

Why We Have To Make Tough Choices on Pensions

As you may have noticed, things are not going well between the city and our unions.

We have not reached agreement with our labor unions on new contracts, even though for most of the unions (including the police union and the Service Employees International Union) the contracts ran out last summer. Last week, all of our unions crowded the City Council chambers to speak about the value of their work and their concern about our negotiating position; and on Monday, SEIU plans a march on City Hall before the council meeting.

While I can’t speak publicly to the specifics of the labor negotiations going on right now, I can talk about what is on the public record – the changes in the compensation policy that the City Council approved last spring. I’d also like to take some time in this blog to explain why I supported those changes – and why I think those changes are important in order to actual protect our ability to pay out good wages, benefits and pensions to our city employees in the long run.

I know that our city employees are very unhappy with the City Council’s bargaining position right now. Our city employees feel like they are being asked to bear an unfair portion of the burden of the financial downturn. They don’t feel as though we value them. And they feel we are being inflexible at the bargaining table. Under the circumstances, these are all understandable feelings and I respect those feelings, probably more than our employees know. I am sure that if I were a full-time city employee I would feel the same way.

But I do want to explain publicly why I supported the changes in the Council’s compensation policy. Frankly, I don’t expect that what I say in this blog will change how any our city employees feel about what’s going on. I totally understand that and I respect it. But I would like both our city employees and the rest of our constituents – many city employees are constituents – to understand where I’m coming from. It would be a disservice to all these constituents, city employees included, not to do so.

I am not interested in placing the burden on the employees just because I think they should pay more. Rather, my goal to make sure that our employees’ pensions are not at risk in the long run – and to make sure that we will have the money to pay competitive wages to our current employees even as pension costs go up.

Last spring, the City Council voted to change its official compensation policy to add two components – first, to ask our employees to once again pay their legally defined “share” of pension contributions (9% of salaries for public safety officers, 7% for everybody else); and, second, to seek a second, lower “tier” of pension benefits for future employees.

This move came as something of a surprise to a lot of our employees. Many were more than surprised; they were hurt. Oftentimes this summer and fall, they have sought me out to ask why we have chosen this path. Don’t we value them? Aren’t we worried about falling so far behind “the market” that it will be hard to recruit and retain talented employees? What’s going on?

I do value our employees – and I never say so often enough. Our city employees work hard serving the public, and most of them could make more money working for another city or public agency. Our public safety officers put their lives on the line for us, and most of the rest of our employees work hard during long careers for relatively modest pensions. And yes, I am worried that Ventura – a venerable city that prides itself on providing excellent service to the public – won’t be able to recruit great new employees nor keep talented ones we already have.

But I’m also worried about the long-term future of our City’s ability to pay pensions to our employees. As a member of the City Council, I am one of seven stewards of the employees’ retirement funds. One of my goals is to make sure that when they retire, 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, the money will be there to pay them the pensions they have earned. And that we won’t have to “short” our current employees in order to pay the pension bills.

This is something that is almost never discussed openly by the City Council or our employees. In our day-to-day conversations and our labor negotiations, we all assume that the money will be there when it needs to be. But as we have learned in the auto industry and other “mature” business sectors, this isn’t always the case.

Part of the reason I am worried is that the world of California public pensions used to be very simple, but now it has become very complicated in a way that places our ability to pay pensions at risk in the long run. At the very least, paying the pensions our current and recently retired employees employees have earned will become much more expensive – and that will make it much more difficult for us to pay our current employees competitive wages and, in fact, to provide public services of any kind.

In the old days, cities contributed money to a system such as CalPERS, the California Public Employment Retirement System, on a regular basis. PERS invested the money in safe things like bonds and averaged an investment return of about 4%.

Virtually all employees received a guaranteed pension, which was pegged to some variation of the 2% formula – you’d get 2% of your annual salary in retirement times the number of years you worked. Most employees retired at 60, though police officers and firefighters tended to retire earlier – at 55 or sometimes even 50 – because you didn’t really want those folks out on the streets at an advanced age. Somehow it all worked out – just like, somehow or other, Social Security always worked out.

But, like Social Security and most other things associated with finance, the world of public pensions has gotten a lot more complicated in the last 30 years.

At cities and other agencies that belong to PERS, salaries have gone up, retirement ages have gone down, retirees are living longer, and, in the case of public safety officers, the old 2% formula has been increased to 3%. Obviously, all these changes have increased the pressure for PERS to deliver greater investment returns – and turned PERS into a very different kind of investor than it used to be.

The whole PERS story is probably best laid out by Ed Mendel, an old friend of mine from my journalist days, who is now a blogger specializing in California pensions. In one recent blog, Ed noted that the world changed dramatically in 1984, when the voters passed Proposition 21, which repealed a law limiting PERS to investing only 25% of its portfolio in stocks. That opened the way for PERS to increase its investment returns by participating in the boom stock market of the ‘80s and ‘90s – which, in turn, increased the pressure to improve retirement benefits for California’s public employees.

As Ed points out in his blog, in 1980 PERS received twice as much revenue from member and employer contributions ($1.6 billion) than from investment returns ($800 million). In 1983, when the stock market started going up, that flipped; PERS got $1.8 billion from contributions and $2 billion from the portfolio.

PERS then rode the exploding stock market all through the ‘80s and ‘90s. By 1998, PERS got $3.7 billion in contributions and $23 billion in investment returns. To reiterate: In 1980, PERS got two-thirds of its funds from member contributations. Less than 20 years later, PERS got 85% of its funds from investment returns.

It was about this time that the state first permitted the 3% formula for public safety officers and also lowered the allowable retirement age for non-public safety personnel from 60 to 55. Most cities in the state quickly adopted both of these options, including Ventura (though Ventura adopted the 3% rule more gradually than most). However, because the stock market continued to skyrocket, cities did not have to pay any “price” at all for these increases – at least not right away. During the Internet boom of the early 2000s, investment returns were so high that PERS actually didn’t require cities to make contributions – at the exact same time that pension benefits were going up and retirement ages were going down.

Then, of course, came the Internet crash and the whole rocky period of the ‘00s, when everybody got caught in the housing bubble. The net result of this is that CalPERS has not been getting the same return it used to – even though costs are now much higher, based mostly on the assumption that returns will remain high.

According to Ed Mendel, CalPERS returns have averaged only 3.1% for the last decade. Yet PERS continues to operate on the assumption that its long-term rate of return will be 7.75%.

Even if investment returns do total 7.75% from now on – extremely unlikely, in my view – our PERS cost is going to go up, because PERS has to cover the cost of investment losses the last couple of years. My best guess for what’s going to happen in the next few years is this: Even if our city revenue starts going up again in a couple of years, those revenue increases will be completely eaten up by increased PERS costs.

Under the circumstances, I think the only responsible position to take is that, whether we like it or not, we will have less money available for salaries and pensions over the next few years – not more, or not even the same amount we have now, but less.

And if investment returns are lower – say, 3% or 4% or 5%? Then the bill from PERS goes way, way up – far more than our revenue. This will affect not only our ability to pay pensions to those who are retired, but also our ability to pay competitive wages to those who still work for us because more and more of our money will go to pay pensions.

If you’re a taxpayer advocate, this is probably a satisfying “I told you so” moment. But even if you believe – as I do – that public employees do important work and deserve a good pension, you’ve got to be really worried.

What happens in, say, 2030, when many of our current employees will be expecting their hard-earned pension checks? When we have 1,000 or 1,200 retirees instead of 600? When we may have to balance the cost of those increased pensions on the backs of people working for the city at that time? And when PERS investment returns have not come anywhere close to 7.75% for years or maybe decades?

How big will the bill be then? Will we be able to afford to pay that bill – and still also provide police and fire service, and pave the streets, and run the parks, and everything else? And provide good wages and benefits to the dedicated employees who do the work?

I don’t know the answer to that question. The fact that I don’t know the answer to that question worries me a lot. And I believe it should worry our city employees a lot as well.

I know that the current labor negotiation is an extremely emotional issue for everybody. I know that many city employees are worried about how they’re going to pay their mortgages or their rent in the future. I know they do not feel valued and they fear we will lose good employees to other cities. All these things concern me too -- a lot. Our employees do great work and everyone in town needs them to continue doing so. And most of our employees are great citizens of our community and we want to continue that too.

But the one thing, I have noticed, that the employees do not seem to be worried about is whether the money will actually be there to pay their pensions in 2020 or 2030 or 2040. Our employees tend simply to assume that they will receive what they are legally entitled to.

But in my opinion, there is no guarantee the money will be there and there is considerable risk that it won’t be. Furthermore, for younger employees, providing those pension benefits to retirees in the future will mean we probably won't be able to provide wage and benefit increases for those still working. This is something that should concern all of us just as much as taking a pay cut now – maybe more. And as one of the seven stewards of the city’s pension system, I believe we must pay attention to this festering problem.

That’s why I believe it’s necessary to take steps to restrain long-term pension costs now – in order to make sure that our current and future retirees will get their pension checks far into the future and our current city employees will not have to pay the price for increased retirement costs. Yes, there are costs and risks to this approach. In the short run, our employees will have to give something up and it will be that much harder to pay the mortgage or the rent. But I believe it is equally important to make the tough choices now to ensure that our employees actually receive their pensions decades from now. And to make sure that we will be able to pay our current employees good wages and benefits, instead of sacrificing their well-being to pay the PERS pension costs for those who are already retired.

One of the things I hear most often from our employees is why we in Ventura seem to be worried about this when nobody else is. After all, most public employee labor contracts negotiated in the last year have had something between a 0% raise and a 3% giveback. If we cut compensation more than that, they say, we will become less competitive and we will lose good employees. So why are we seeking higher compensation cuts when nobody else is?

This is a good question. My answer, frankly, is that I don’t think the other agencies are looking at these issues straight-up – or they’re not being straight-up with the employees.

At Ventura County (which has its own separate retirement system), most employees agreed to start paying 3% of their retirement cost. That’s great. But the county retirement system’s investment portfolio has lost something like 25% of its value, and with lots of retirements in the offing, county pension costs are estimated to increase 50% in the next five years. Clearly, more givebacks will be necessary.

Another tactic we often see is for a city to promise future increases in salary -- say, 2-3-4% in the "out years" of a five-year contract -- in exchange for zero increase or a giveback in the early years. But this doesn't really solve the problem, because other cities are going to be facing huge increases in PERS costs just as we are. When you ask the elected officials in these cities how they are going to pay for the future salary increases, they'll say: “We don’t know.”

In such a situation, the price of short-term labor peace is to kick the can down the road, assume that somehow or other more money will be available in the future, and ignore the fact that there are looming long-term risks.

I cannot, in good conscience, do the same. Our employees are entitled to these pensions and they deserve them. But they also deserve straight talk about the future from their City Council.

It would be very easy for me to pretend there is no long-term problem and therefore no reason to make tough choices now, just as our neighboring city did. Even though this would make me more popular with the unions, it would be fiscally irresponsible of me – and, frankly, pretty unfair to our hard-working employees. Because, in the end, I won’t pay the price for that fiscal irresponsibility. That cost will be borne by our employees, both current and retired.

Simply put, it would be wrong of me to reap the short-term political benefit of pretending there’s no problem, and then dump the problem on my successors and on our employees themselves in the decades ahead.

As I said, I know our city employees are unhappy with what’s going on and angry at me and my fellow councilmembers. I don’t expect my explanation here to change that. But I do hope both our employees and our other constituents recognize that making tougher choices now will create a more solvent city – and a more stable retirement system – in the future, and that everyone – most of all employees – will benefit from that stability.

Will Ventura Pay For Bell's Bad Deeds?

The Bell compensation scandal is coming “home to roost” in lots of ways – but I’d like to talk about one in particular: The question of whether Ventura will get dragged into the Bell situation – and be required to foot part of the bill for Bell’s spiked pensions.

The latest issue is not how much Bell’s overpaid top employees will make, but who foots the bill. Ventura may be on the hook to pay a good portion of Bell Police Chief Randy Adams’s vastly increased pension because Adams spent 20 years working for the Ventura Police Department. We may be in the same situation with Angela Spaccia, Bell’s assistant city manager, who also worked for Ventura – but not for nearly as many years. (A bill now pending in the state legislature may get us off the hook, however.)

Adams doubled his annual pension – from something like $200,000 to $400,000 – by working at a very high salary in Bell for one year. But under the rules governing the California Public Employee Retirement System, previous employers are apparently on the hook for a pro-rata share of Adams’ pension. Adams worked in Ventura longer than anywhere else, so under one interpretation of PERS rules, we’ll have to pay about 60% of Adams’ pension spike.

This is ridiculous, of course. An irresponsible city council 80 miles away makes a sweetheart deal with a guy who left our employ 15 years ago and all of a sudden we’re on the hook for many tens of thousand of dollars a year. PERS has put Adams' pension on hold for now (along with Spaccia’s and Bell City Manager Richard Rizzo’s) while Attorney General Jerry Brown investigates the situation. We have joined with Simi Valley and Glendale, Adams’s other previous employers, in fighting against the increased price of Adams’ pension – and we’re committed to continuing the fight.

The whole Bell situation, however, has begun to shine a light on PERS’s policies regarding who actually pays for pensions, which have traditionally been anything but transparent. In many ways, these policies make sense. But it may be time for a change, especially if the good times of skyrocketing stock market and real estate values that we have experienced over the last 20 years have come to an end.

PERS is the largest pension system in the world. It provides pensions for over 1 million people and has assets worth more than $200 billion, including huge investments in both stocks and real estate. PERS tries to pay as much of its pension costs from return on investment as possible, but if investment returns fall short, the member agencies – such as Ventura – must pay the difference.

Conceptually, then, here’s what happens:

-- We give money to PERS for every employees’ pension.

-- PERS invests that money and gets a return.

-- If that’s not enough to cover pensions for our employees (which are of course guaranteed at a certain level – that’s the “defined benefit” approach), PERS asks us for more money to cover the difference.

Right now, the city’s retirement assets at PERS total something like $360 million, which is about 85% of the amount of money required to cover the pension costs, according to PERS’ projections.

We don’t, however, receive an itemized bill from PERS that says, here’s how much you have to sock away for each current employee’s pension and here’s how much additional you have to pay because we missed our goals for investment return. So, for example, there will be no line item for “Paying Randy Adams’ pension because of what Bell did”.

Instead PERS calculates all of our obligations and translates that into a formula – expressed as the percentage of overall employee compensation required to cover the PERS bill. I think this number is currently something like 40% for public safety employees and 28% for non-safety employees.

This sounds like a lot. But remember, this isn’t just the amount of money we’re socking away for current employees. It also includes whatever we must pay to cover the cost of retiree pensions if PERS misses its investment targets (which obviously it has been doing lately). And we recently crossed an important threshold – we now have more retirees than current employees.

PERS does the calculation this way because, like Social Security, it is not an investment fund where you park your money and hope for a return. Rather, it is an enormous investment pool that seeks to spread risk as much as possible – usually the risk of low stock market returns but, as we have now seen, the risk of elected officials acting irresponsibly as well. PERS spreads risk in many ways. It spreads investment risk over hundreds of agencies. It spreads the risk of unusually high pensions, as we now know, among all of that retiree’s employers. Among smaller cities, PERS spreads this same risk among many cities. Bell City Manager Rizzo’s pension (reputed to be in excess of $600,000 a year) will be borne in part by 140 smaller cities in the PERS system, including Bell. (Apparently, Adams’ pension will not be covered by this small-city pool because he worked mostly for bigger cities).

In addition, PERS spreads the risk of low investment returns out over time through a process called “smoothing”. If PERS investment returns do not meet the targets – as has been the case the last couple of years – obviously PERS’s member agencies have to pay more money to cover pension costs. Instead of sending us that increased bill all at once, however, PERS spreads the increase out over time so we don’t feel the blow all at once.

Usually this is not a big problem, because most cities have pay scales that are more or less in line with one another. (I would guess that virtually all public sector salaries in California are within plus-or-minus 20% for the equivalent job.) But Bell’s misdeeds throw this equilibrium out of whack, which is why I think we hang tough on not paying the pensions of Randy Adams and Angie Spaccia.

We Really Don't Do It For The Money

In the wake of the City of Bell compensation scandal, I suggested that the best way for public officials to be accountable to the voters on compensation is simply to reveal everything in public. I began my professional life as a journalist and I know that “sunshine” is often the best remedy for back-room deals.

Many others, including Gov. Schwarzenegger and the League of California Cities, have reached the same conclusion. And so has our city. I’m proud to say that Ventura has now posted an entire package of material about our own city compensation online. Much of this information was already public – we approve our salary schedules, our union contracts, and our contracts with the city manager and city attorney in public session – but it wasn’t readily available. Now it is. So please take a look if you’d like. As I say, sunshine is often the best medicine.

Given the controversy in Bell – where City Councilmembers made upwards of $100,000 per year by serving on various commissions that did nothing – many people have been asking how much we on the City Council make. The answer is simple: As mayor, I bring home about $12,000 per year, all in. That’s down about $2,400 from the last fiscal year. And that’s a lot less than what our colleagues in the other large Ventura County cities (Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Oxnard, and Camarillo) make. It’s a little hard to compare apples-to-apples, but all of them seem to make somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 per year.

Here’s how it breaks down:

-- The Mayor makes $700 a month, or $8,400 per year. This is established in the City Charter and it has been the same for about 40 years. (Councilmembers make $600.) These amounts can’t be changed without a vote to change the charter.

-- All councilmembers also get a $100 per month local travel allowance. This used to be $300 for the mayor and $200 for councilmembers, but we cut it back to $100 starting on July 1 to help meet the City Council’s budget reduction goal of 10%.

-- I am on two boards for which I receive a stipend. Both have to do with transportation – the Ventura County Transportation Commission and Gold Coast Transit. For each, I receive $100 per meeting and there are 10-11 meetings per year of each, so that’s another $2,000-$2,200 per year.

I’m also on the county Library Services Commission, but there’s no stipend associated with that (just a lot of headache!). And although some cities compensate their councilmembers additionally for serving as Redevelopment Agency commissioners and so forth, we get no additional compensation for things like that.

So that’s about $12,000. As for travel beyond the $100 per month for local travel, the council’s overall travel budget for travel outside of Ventura County is $17,500, which is about half of what it was three years ago. Each councilmember gets $2,750 and can choose their travel, though they can trade back and forth if they want.

Councilmembers also participate in either Social Security or the California Public Employment Retirement System, whichever they choose. In either case, the city’s share of the contribution is a pittance. And we are permitted to participate in the city’s health insurance program, but we must pay 100% of the cost. I choose to participate in the dental and vision insurance programs at my own expense, but I get medical insurance through my day job.

We recently checked around with the other cities in the County to see how we stack up. We were actually a little surprised to discover how poorly we are compensated compared to our peers.

In most larger cities in Ventura County, the Mayor and City Councilmembers get paid between $1,000 and $1,750 per month -- essentially, double to triple what we get. In almost all these cities, they also get additional compensation – things like city-paid medical insurance that they can cash out or flexible spending accounts, bigger travel allowances, and sometimes even contributions to a 457 retirement program (the public-sector equivalent of a 401k) or a deferred compensation program. As I mentioned above, as near as I can figure it’s between $20,000 and $30,000 per year, compared to $10,000 to $12,000 per year for us in Ventura.

I won’t lie: I certainly wish we made more money. In addition to being mayor, I hold down a full-time job (which, fortunately, I also love). I think fair compensation for a councilmembers would be somewhere around $40,000 a year, which is about what our colleagues in Santa Barbara make.

But I’m not complaining. I knew what the pay was when I signed up for this job and I have certainly never asked for or expected more than that. I don’t know about Bell, but here in Ventura the mayor and the city council clearly don’t do it for the money.

The Fallout From Bell

The controversy over high salaries of both staff and councilmembers in the City of Bell -- a controversy involving two former City of Ventura -- continues to reverberate. The staff members have resigned, the councilmembers have cut their pay 90%, and the state is investigating both the salaries themselves and the pension consequences they will have.

How could this happen? How can we avoid it happening in Ventura and other communities near us?

I'm pretty familiar with the cities in the Bell area from my past life as a journalist, so you can read a long blog I wrote here about what happened there and how we can be vigilant in making sure it doesn't happen again.

The Cliffhanger Budget

Last week, the City Council approved the 2010-11 budget by a vote of 6-0 with Councilmember Weir absent because of a longstanding commitment. It’s not a budget any of us are happy with or proud of.

In order to close yet another multimillion-dollar deficit, we voted in favor of significantly reducing the number of police officers and firefighters – this will result in the “closing” of Fire Station 4, at least for now – the possible closure of the Downtown Senior Recreation Center unless we can close a deal for somebody else to take over the building, the elimination of more than 40 positions citywide, further reductions in park and streetscape maintenance, and a general thinning of the ranks for the second year in a row.

Plain and simple, this is a cliffhanger budget, designed to help us squeeze through the third fiscal year in a row where revenue has declined, and still hang on to the basic infrastructure of our city services. I hope it’s the most draconian budget I ever have to vote on.

Most of the attention in the last few weeks, of course, was focused on the question of whether we would continue to staff Fire Station No. 4, on Telephone Road near Montgomery, which City Manager Rick Cole and Fire Chief Kevin Rennie suggested was the station least likely to have a significant impact on our fire department response times if it were closed. Both the firefighters union and many of Station 4’s neighbors took us to task on that idea, saying it stretches the Fire Department too thin. The fact of the matter is that this budget stretches everything very thin. This includes not just the Fire Department but the Police Department as well, which won’t lose any beat cops but will see a reduction in all kinds of support services – detectives, the graffiti team – that help to keep our community safe.

At this point, it is not too much of a mystery to most people why we are having to make these cuts. We have lost more than $15 million in revenue in the last 2½ years. Our General Fund revenue is back down to the 2003 levels; our sales tax revenue has dipped down to the level we saw in around 1999. Property tax is stagnant and beginning to go down.

Just as there was last year, this year there was considerable interplay between our proposed budget on the one hand and our labor negotiations on the other. The reason is not surprising: When revenue is going down there are only a few ways to reduce expenses and most of them of them affect our employees. The options usually go like this:

1. “Go out of business” in some areas by simply ceasing to perform some low-priority functions, which usually means eliminating positions.

2. Reduce levels of service in at least some areas – if not all of them – another step that usually involves eliminating positions.

3. Reduce employee compensation.

And the hard truth of the matter is that there’s usually a tradeoff here. Either we reduce the number of positions – some vacant positions and some layoffs – or else everybody takes a pay cut.

Last year, we did all three things. For example, we no longer fund any public art out of the General Fund; and all of our bargaining units agreed to a 5% cut in 2009-10, much of which was taken in the form of things like less vacation. (We were one of the few cities in the state to successfully negotiate such a cut.)

This year, it has been harder to do anything of these things in a way that doesn’t really hurt. There are few low-priority activities that we have not ceased doing. Cuts in service are beginning to hurt because we have cut the back offices all we can. Most significant, it has been more difficult this year for us to reach agreement with our labor unions for pay cuts. We are asking for more than we did before – short-term and long-term – and they are pushing back.

Since we haven’t successfully negotiated any pay cuts, we didn’t put any savings from those pay cuts into the budget. We are currently in negotiations with the police union and with SEIU Local 721, which represents all of our non-public-safety workers. These contracts expire on July 1.

We also engaged in a lot of talks with the firefighers union, even though their contract doesn’t expire until December, because they were interested in keeping Station 4 open. (The real cost savings in Station 4 is not “closing” the station; it’s the $1.2 million in savings that comes from eliminating 9 of our 66 firefighter positions.)

The firefighters stuck with us, and came up with many creative ideas, and we made some progress. In the end, however, the reductions they offered were not enough to reopen Station 4; and the Council was unwilling to accept one of the conditions the firefighters asked for in return – a guaranteed number of firefighters on duty at any given time. This would be an unprecedented step for the city to take. No city union contract currently contains guaranteed staffing for any department. If we accepted this condition, we would essentially be earmarking a certain percentage of the budget for the firefighters – exactly the same kind of earmark that has made it impossible for the state to balance its budget year after year.

So in the end, we were unable to reach a deal with the firefighters and we adopted the budget without any wage concessions. On July 1, both our police force and our fire department will be reduced. Fire Station 4 will go unstaffed most of the time for now. We will further reduce park and landscape maintenance and we will shrink in many other ways as well.

I said at the beginning that this is not a budget to be proud of, and that’s certainly true considering service cuts it contains. But one thing I think we should be proud of here in Ventura is that, unlike so many other public agencies, we are facing the issues head-on and we’re not papering them over.

We’re balancing our budget, just as our City Charter requires, and we’re doing it honestly, even if honesty comes with pain.

We’re not using reserves or other “one-time money” to keep things going.

We’re not pretending we’re going to get more revenue than we are.

We’re not – as some cities are doing – reaching agreement with our labor unions by promising them raises in three or four years, when we have no idea what the future will bring.

But that doesn’t mean we will stop trying to figure out ways to restore the services we have lost. I view the “closure” of Station 4 as temporary – though I can’t tell you whether temporary means six months or five years.

Nor will we stop looking at ways to restrain future spending. We are going to have to restrain spending to accomplish three goals: (1) ensure our long-term solvency; (2) maintain our ability to provide services to our constituents; and (3) maintain our ability to meet our financial commitments to our loyal and hard-working employees. We will continue to negotiate with our labor unions for short-term pay cuts, which could help restore some service cuts in the short-term. We will also continue to work collaboratively with our unions on long-term pension reform.
But all this is not enough. We cannot achieve all these goals unless we also reinvent the way we deliver public services.

What do I mean by reinvention? Mostly what I mean is questioning how we do things. All too often in government, we desperately scramble to try to keep doing things the same way as we have always done them – without thinking about whether the current system is cost-effective, or even effective at all. Instead of trying to figure out how to maintain the current infrastructure as it exists, let’s focus instead on what the goal is.

So, for example, all through the debate about the Fire Department budget, the focus has been on how to keep Fire Station No. 4 open – a perspective that has been driven largely by the vocal involvement of the firefighters union and the people who live near Station 4. To me, however, the question is not how to keep Station 4 open, but how to make sure that our firefighter/paramedics can be at your home or your business, with the right equipment, when you need them. Once you make that shift, it liberates you to think differently about what the city does and how we do it.

In fact, we already stretch our resources in public safety by moving people and equipment around on an hour-by-hour basis. We think that if Station No. 4 is open, three firefighters are located there 24/7 waiting for your call. In fact, the Battalion Chief on duty is always redeploying our fire engines geographically depending on the circumstances.

So, if you're having a heart attack and call 911, Engine No. 4 may actually be sitting in Station No. 4. But, depending on what's going on, Engine No. 4 could be at a structure fire up in the hills, or at the training facility at Seaward and Allessandro, or sitting on Station 1 on the Avenue, backing up because Engine No. 1 is engaged somewhere. (It is typical practice in the Fire Department to move equipment around so that Stations 1 (Avenue), 2 (Seaward), and 3 (Buena) are always backed up, because these areas have the highest volume of calls.) In any of these circumstances, your call would be responded to by a different engine, including possibly the county engine in Saticoy. I cannot tell you how frequently this occurs now, but it's an everyday occurrence.

Similarly, after July 1, we will not have a crew permanently located at Fire Station 4, but that does not mean it will always be empty. In all probability, sometimes a crew (city or county) will be present there on occasion, again depending on how our Battalion Chief chooses to deploy resources.

So, already, the way we deploy are resources are very dynamic, even though we think they are static. But we have to move beyond the question of deployment to deeper questions of efficiency and effectiveness. If the job of most firefighters these days is to be paramedics, does every firefighter have to be attached to a fire station in a stationary location – or even to a fire engine that contains all kind of equipment not needed to rescue you while you’re having a heart attack? Reinventing things like fire and paramedic service takes time, effort, and commitment. And it’s an uphill battle against the natural inclination of practically everybody – constituents, politicians, and employees alike – to protect the status quo.

But let’s face it: We’ve spent the last three years cutting wages, cutting jobs, and cutting services. Now we’re at the bottom. It’s time to stop cutting and start reinventing

Living Within Our Means, 2010 Style

Last night, we on the City Council got our first glimpse of what the 2010-2011 city budget is likely to look like. It's pretty grim, and for the first time in this long recession we are likely to see some serious cuts in service no matter what we do. But in a certain way, oddly enough, I'm optimistic.

For one thing, we're beginning to see a lot of hard work pay off. While we're likely to wind up with deep cuts in some areas, in other areas we are beginning to do more with less -- successfully. We really are beginning to reinvent our city government to make it more efficient.

For another, I think it's possible that this is as bad as it's going to get. Our revenue may go down a little more, but it's likely that the worst revenue drops are behind us. What does that mean? It means we will have made it through the hard times more or less intact, and we can begin to build for the future again.

Before I talk about the grim part of this year's budget, let me quickly review what's been doing on and where we are:

-- The City's General Fund revenue has dropped from about $95 million to about $81 million in two years. That's a decrease of around 15%. We're likely to see a levelling off at about $81 million in 2010-11.

-- We've already made some pretty severe cuts. Last year, we were the first city in the state -- so far as I know -- that successfully negotiated a pay cut (not a furlough) from our employee unions.

-- We've eliminated 40 jobs (out of about 650) and we're currently holding about 40 more jobs open to save money.

-- We've had an open and public pension reform dialogue for a year now, and two weeks ago the City Council committed itself unanimously to the philosophy of "sustainable pension reform" by pursuing such ideas as a two-tiered pension system and getting employees to increase their own pension contributions.

-- And I'm most proud of the fact that we've had a very public and straight-up discussion about what to do about the budget. From the beginning, we've laid out our budget issues in public, early on, and invited widespread public debate. We're not always rewarded for this (a lot of people seem to think that we're in worse shape than other cities, which isn't true, just because we talk about our budget issues more). But it's a great improvement over the days before I was elected, when our city -- like so many others -- resorted to gimmickry, band-aids, and stop-gap measures to avoid dealing with the real issues.

So, what does the proposed budget look like -- and how is it likely to change between now and June 21, when we're scheduled to adopt it. Here's a summary of critical issues, drawn from the City Manager's budget transmittal letter:

Among the steps to actually reduce service are the following: possibly closing the downtown senior recreation center (more about that later), leaving Fire Station #4 at Telephone and Clinton empty, and reducing the number of sworn police officers but maintaining the same number of beat cops).

Among the steps to reduce cost are a permanent elimination of those 40 vacant jobs and seeking an extension of wage concessions from our unions. (The latter has not been negotiated yet and so is not reflected in the draft budget).

Among the steps being taken to reinvent city government and deliver services more efficiently are moving Building & Safety to the Community Development Department, reorganizing the parks crews (and reducing their size from four to two workers each), and contracting out much more work -- for example, all of the landscaping maintenance and web site management.

In his budget message, the City Manager did lay out one possible big-ticket item to cut: the Aquatics Center at the Community Park, the shutdown of which would save more than a half-million dollars. But he didn't actually propose this cut, suggesting other cuts instead.

Since the budget proposal came out last week, we've heard from a lot of senior citizens who don't want us to close the downtown senior center and also from some folks who are supporters of the Aquatics Center, asking us not to close it. As I stated, the Aquatics Center is not on the chopping block at the moment -- though it could be if the council decides that, for example, staffing Fire Station #4 is more important. And the way we're approaching the senior center is a good example of how we're reinventing government.

The senior center costs $100,000 a year in overhead and is located less than a mile from a second senior center on Ventura Avenue. Worst case scenario is that all the senior programs get moved to the Avenue (none would be cut). But the city's goal is not to shutter the downtown center; it's to save $100,000 in overhead. So the city is negotiating with various private organizations who might lease the building and still make it available for some senior programs.It's also possible that some programs might be moved to the Topping Room at Foster Library, which is lightly used during the day. Oddly, this one could wind up being a win-win -- the senior programs stay downtown, many of them at the senior center, but the city no longer has to foot the overhead bill.

The big unknown -- the big thing that could change -- is the employee union contracts. All of these contracts expire between July and January, so we will be renegotiating all of them soon. If we could obtain wage concessions similar to last year, lower employee compensation would provide us with more than $2 million in savings -- enough to reopen the fire station and restore a whole lot more besides. We don't know yet how the negotiations will turn out, but as I mentioned before the council voted 7-0 just a couple of weeks ago to pursue more employee pension contributions and reform in pension costs.

Which brings me to the last item from Monday night -- the seemingly odd "reaffirmation" of the 2008 contract agreement with our firefighters that increased the pensions of current firefighters. We made this concession in 2008 (as part of a contract negotiation in which the firefighters agreed, among other things, not to take a raise). The firefighters agreed to postpone the pension for a year last year (that saved us more than a half-million dollars). But because they have not agreed to bump it another year, we had to comply with a new state law requiring a public hearing with a state pension actuarial present. (We had to do it last night in order to set the paperwork in motion for a July implementation date.) Our City Attorney had advised us that there was, basically, no legal way to deny the firefighters the pension increase at this point, and all we would do if we voted against it would invite a lawsuit from the firefighters that we would lose.

The actual vote on Monday was something of an anti-climax. Three representatives from the Ventura County Taxpayers Association spoke. But they were low-key, reasonable, and thoughtful in their approach. They suggested we "slow down" rather than reaffirm the pension increase now, apparently on the theory that if we withhold approving the pension increase, the firefighters will be more likely to negotiate with us on other things. I don't disagree with their goal -- get back more from the firefighters than you give -- but I didn't agree with their strategy.

In the end, I couldn't buy the argument that by setting ourselves up for a lawsuit we were sure to lose, we would somehow or other increase our negotiating leverage with the firefighters. Nor did I think that political grandstanding -- voting against something knowing it's going to go through anyway -- was either honest or useful. I voted for it.

But I voted for it recognizing that this vote is part of a much longer, larger, and painful transition in our approach to pension reform. We will go to the negotiating table later this year and bargain hard. In the case of the firefighters, we will bargain hard to get back the value of the increased pension and then some. They may be legally entitled to the higher pension, but we owe it to our constituents to make sure that our employees share the sacrifice required to get us through these difficult times.

Talking To The Folks About Making Tough Choices

If you've lived in Ventura long enough, you know that we love to talk about things forever. In some towns, the City Council just moves forward and does things with little interaction with or involvement from the community. But don't ever try that in Ventura. You won't get community buy-in for whatever you're doing, and you'll get pasted by the people.

That's why, as the City Council tries to figure out our budget priorities for next year, we tried something a little different on Saturday -- a kind of round-robin, small-group discussion between councilmembers and the people. It's the first of several public events we're going to have in order to take the public's temperature as we enter another tough budget period. Consider it a community version of a family kitchen-table conversation about how to trim things back to balance the household budget.

Put this on your calendar: We'll have another event, a kind of a "drop-in and talk" thing, at ArtWalk on April 17th.

Next year's budget is going to involve a bunch of tough choices. We had to cut $11 mlilion out of this year's budget -- going from $96 million for a "business as usual" budget to $85 million -- and next year it's going to be more like $15 million, going down to $81 million. So there's no getting around those tough choices.

And the message I'm getting from our folks -- if Saturday is any indication -- is pretty simple: Make the tough choices.

If you've been following our approach to this, you know we've been looking at how to prioritize four different approaches in order to balance the budgetL

1. Eliminate low-priority services.
2. Continue reductions in employee compensation.
3. Reinvent city services so that we can deliver the same services more efficiently.
4. "Muddle through," by continuing to provide services in a way that is probably unsustainable in the long run and wait for the economy to get better.

To this list we recently added the approach of generating new revenue through economic development -- always a priority, but one that is unlikely to yield real results in time to build next year's budget.

On Saturday, we tried to take the community's temperature in an informal way. We set up a round-robin discussion where the folks sat in small groups and the councilmembers -- each of whom took a different approach on the list above -- moved from table to table for 15-minute conversations.

The truth is, we had no idea how this was going to turn out. The whole thing was put together in less than two weeks and weren't sure how many people would show up.

We wound up getting close to 200 people at Poinsettia Pavilion -- so many that we had to vastly expand the number of tables and draft quite a few city staff members to augment the councilmembers as facilitators. Wow! I love the way Venturans get involved.

Early in the week, the city staff will post the notes and themes that emerged from the workshop. But here's a little about what I experienced in the five tables I facilitated.

The approach I drew was "muddling through" -- the idea of trimming a little here, cutting a little there, postponing this or that, and hoping for the best till the economy comes back and revenue goes up. Frankly, muddling through is what most government agencies do in hard times (my joke was that we were discussing the one approach our City Council is good at) -- and both the pro and the con for this approach have to do with the fact that it allows you to avoid hard choices.

On the plus side, if you muddle through you can try to hang on to your institutions and infrastructure at a reduced level until things go back to normal.

On the minus side is the fact that things never go back to normal, and so it's almost impossible to simply go on doing business as usual when the economy comes back.

Not surprisingly, then, the conclusion of most of the folks I spoke with was that we shouldn't muddle through. Instead, we should do what we got elected to do: Make the tough choices in consultation with our community. Given the budget situation, we probably don't have much choice.

But along the way, the folks I talked to threw out some terrific ideas about how we can stretch our dollars farther. There were two that I heard over and over again:

-- Use more volunteers and use them more effectively. The volunteer power we have in Ventura is amazing, and we ought to be able to make tremendous strides by using them as well as we can. Volunteers clean up the beaches, help out the police, assist even in refilling the dog bags in the parks. I agree: Let's keep going in this direction.

-- Crosstrain city employees. Our city employees do a great job. But to stretch our resources in this economy, we ought crosstrain them more so that they are capable of doing more different jobs and working more flexibly. Obviously there are limits to this (you might not want an office worker working as a police officer -- or vice versa!) but it's still a great idea for "reinventing government" that's worth exploring.

It's always hard to get everybody involved, and it's never easy to reach consensus, especially when we have to make tough choices. But Saturday's event was a great start to this year's budget discussion. Thanks to everybody who came.

KCET Checks Out Ventura

Check out this KCET web site story on what's going on in Ventura.

Help Us Live Within Our Means

It's February going on March, and for better or worse that means it's beginning to be budget season here in Ventura. For the psat three years, budget season hasn't been much fun. As our revenues have declined, often far below our conservative projections, we have spent most of the spring figuring out how to cut -- how to cut services, how to cut compensation for our employees, how to cut the cost of our contracts. This year is going to be no exception. We're $15 million down from our projected revenue only two years ago, we're going to have to make some tough decisions.

In many cities, the City doesn't really begin to deal with budget problems until May or June -- shortly before the June 30th deadline for budget adoption. (You saw this last spring, when many of our neighboring cities panicked in June.) But here in Ventura, we like to talk. And talk. And talk. And generally speaking, this approach has served us well. Last year, we had a lengthy public discussion about the budget in January and February, and as a result we had made the tough decisions and resolved the tough issues by the time the City Manager submitted his proposed budget to the Council, as is required by our City Charter.

Now we on the City Council are undertaking a process -- admittedly, a quick one -- of reaching out to our constituents so that we can listen to what you have to say as the budget is crafted for the 2010-11 fiscal year. Last night, the Council authorized moving forward with a public outreach plan in March and April that, we hope, will help us reach consensus about what to do.

There will be two big events -- a town hall workshop on Saturday, March 6th, to get your thoughts, and another workshop on Saturday, April 17th, to let you know what we heard. These are not formal meetings of the City Council; they are community workshops.

But this is only part of the process. The councilmembers will also be going out into the community asking questions and listening and all kinds of events in the next few weeks. In addition, there will be all kinds of other ways to participate, including an online survey.

These details have not all been worked out yet, but I'll keep you posted when they are. I know it's quick, but we need to know what you think ... now!

This year, we're also going to ask for your opinion in a slightly different way. For the past two years, we've asked you what to cut. Over that time, we've gotten a pretty consistent set of answers. We're still interested in knowing whether that list of priorities is valid, but this year we'd also like to know how we should cut.

At our council goals-setting workshop back in January, we laid out four different possible ways we can cut. These were:

1. Eliminate low-priority services.
2. Continue reductions in employee compensation.
3. Reinvent city services so that we can deliver the same services more efficiently.
4. "Muddle through," by continuing to provide services in a way that is probably unsustainable in the long run and wait for the economy to get better.

We agreed that we would probably do all 4, but we weren't sure where the emphasis would be.

To this list later on, we added a 5th possibility, which is to increase revenue through economic development and other means (though not raising taxes).

So a major question to you will be, depending on what the priorities are, which of these techniques should we focus on? I hope you can start thinking about that now so you can let us know during this March-April outreach process.

One other thing to think about as we enter into this public outreach period. For the past couple of years, the City Council has functioned under a set of "Budget Operating Principles" -- guidance for our staff and ourselves as we put together the budget. Last night we revised them slightly for the coming here. Here they are:

In the face of continuing national economic crisis, Ventura must continue to ensure fiscal sustainability by living within our means. The City Council rejects the reckless policy of spending money we don’t have. In revising the adopted spending plan for next year, the FY 2011/12 budget will be based on shared contributions for reducing General Fund expenses:

-- Further reductions in lower priority programs and expenses
-- Continuation of employee compensation reductions
-- “Re-inventing” services to reduce costs

The Council seeks to engage the community in understanding and shaping the tough choices that must be made. Rather than compromising the success of high-priority efforts by inadequate funding, the Council recognizes the need to determine what programs could be eliminated, restructured or assigned to others without compromising the core mission and highest priorities of City government.  Although generating additional revenue is not expected to close the projected budget gap for next year, high priority will be given to longer-run efforts to restore prosperity and rebuild revenue to restore desired community services and competitive compensation.


Overall Priority Statements
1. Emphasize economic prosperity to ensure sustainable funding for necessary city programs and to meet critical needs, including maintaining the high priority City Council has placed on public safety, financial stewardship, and streets and public utilities

Revenue Operating Principles
1. Move toward recovering the full cost of any fee-based service except where the Council and the community see a clear public interest in full or partial subsidy
2. Without lowering standards of quality, streamline regulations and processes that impede business investment and economic prosperity
3. Assure sufficient resources to actively pursue Federal and State funding opportunities
4. Programs, and initiatives that produce income rapidly, or save future expenses rapidly should generally be given higher priority than those that simply consume revenue

Expense Operating Principles
1. Reorganize to cut costs and improve effectiveness in order to submit a structurally balanced budget
2. Use the green strategies whenever we can demonstrate a short-term net reduction in operating costs
3. Emphasize pro-active prevention over reactive responses to reduce costs
4. Make strategic use of volunteers, partnerships and collaborations, including with other public agencies, to meet community needs and/or provide services.
5. Do not use “one-time money” for ongoing operations.

Stay tuned, and I hope to hear from you in March and April.

Wright's Final Hours

Back in 1997, when my book The Reluctant Metropolis was published, I arranged to do a book reading and signing at the Ventura Bookstore on Main Street downtown. We did the book reading upstairs in the Odd Fellows Hall and then sold the books downstairs in the cozy confines of the bookstore itself. I loved that bookstore. It had been around for decades, and for most of that time it was about the only place you could go in Ventura to purchase a brand-new, just-published book. The shelves and aisles were crowded, and the selection of books was somehow simultaneously quirky and very solid, just like the owner, Ed Elrod – a local guy who knew everybody in town.

The Ventura Bookstore is long gone now. (The space is now occupied by Heart’s Delight Clothiers.) It closed down soon after Barnes & Noble opened up out on Telephone Road. Ed Elrod joined other independent booksellers around the country in suing Barnes & Noble and Borders for driving small bookstores like Ventura Bookstore out of business – a lawsuit they predictably elost. Few people remember the Ventura Bookstore today, but I do. I still miss it. Barnes & Noble is great – it has way more books and a much better atmosphere, which in a way is better for Ventura, and it is teeming with people 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. But somehow it doesn’t replace the Ventura Bookstore or the wonderful feeling of having a great bookstore right on Main Street downtown.

I got to thinking about the Ventura Bookstore tonight when I joined a group of about 40 or so people at Wright Library to grieve over the library’s closing. It was a very sad moment, because Wright is justly recognized as a great neighborhood institution for the people who live near Ventura College and all the students who go to school near there. (Half of the students in Ventura Unified go to school within a mile of Wright.) No matter what libraries evolve into in the future in Ventura, nothing will ever fill Wright’s place.

For the last hour or two before the 8 p.m. closing, folks milled around, talking and checking out books. Some were library advocates who have come to accept the loss of Wright; others were angry patrons who wanted to participate in a night-long vigil. After closing time, Library Director Jackie Griffin said the staff had to go home and asked people to leave. Many of the lights were turned off. Some people left, and a group of perhaps 20 remained. They began to chant, “Keep Wright Open,” and continued to do so for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Then Debbie Giles, one of our most wonderful longtime community activists, asked the folks if they would like to speak their thoughts or ask questions.

For the next two hours, Jackie Griffin and I talked with these folks, answering questions and engaging in a dialogue with them. Little by little the crowd thinned out, but 10 or 15 people stayed till well past 10 o’clock to talk. Sometimes people yelled at me; once or twice I lost my cool and yelled back. Many people made it extremely clear that they don’t trust the City Council and a few clearly believe that somehow or other money has been mismanaged or Wright has been cheated by the county system. I don’t believe these things but I understand they are part of grieving a loss.

As time went on, however, we talked more and more about different ways that we might be able to raise enough money to maintain our current level of library service; or other ideas dealing with Wright or and our library system in town. Over time, this became, for me, a truly remarkable experience. It’s exactly the kind of conversation we on the City Council should have with our constituents every day – close up, emotional, intense, one-on-one. It was exhausting, but wonderful. It’s the kind of “town hall” discussion I believe we on the council must engage in more often.

The bottom line, of course, was that everybody in the room wanted me to tell them I would find a way to keep the library open. And, of course, I was unable to make them happy. During the course of the evening, three ideas emerged.

First, to use some of the $500,000 or so in funds set aside for a new library to operate Wright in the next year or two.

Second, to alternate days at Wright and Foster indefinitely.

Third, to “mothball” Wright rather than dismantle it and put a parcel tax exclusively for libraries on the ballot in June.

The first two ideas are clearly the most serious ideas to consider if the goal is to keep Wright open at any cost. As to the first one, the council’s policy throughout this financial crisis has been not to use “one-time” money for operating purposes. I believe that’s simply trading tomorrow for today, and it doesn’t solve the problem of not having a financially sustainable library program in the city (No one – not even the two council members who voted against my motion last week – proposed this solution publicly at our meeting.) As to the second, I never liked the idea and I believe that Jackie is right when she says that it may be okay temporarily but it’s not operationally sustainable in the long run.

As to mothballing Wright and running a parcel tax, I’m certainly open to the idea. But it would require a lot of work on the part of a lot of people and I don’t think it would pass. Nevertheless, I look forward to talking with library advocates and patrons about the idea in the weeks ahead.

But I think there is far, far more to the future of libraries in this town than wrestling with the Wright question. Last week at the City Council, the motion I made – and passed by the council – contained several pieces to it. All are important to bear in mind as we move forward. They include the following:

-- To accelerate our existing process of long-term strategic planning for library service in the city. Our library strategic planning task force faces one major decision that has an enormous ripple effect: Should we focus on one large central library, as Camarillo has, or many small libraries serving individual neighborhoods? I believe that if we choose the latter, we will probably – for cost reasons – have to consolidate our libraries with other neighborhood-level services (parks, rec programs, senior and youth programs), which means we’ll have to reinvent the libraries themselves so they can be smaller and still effective.

-- Explore with the library agency unconventional ways to bring library service to East Ventura. This may mean a bookmobile, but it may also mean promoting online alternatives and very localized library systems – for example, ordering a book online through the library agency and then “checking it out” at a kiosk in your neighborhood. Technologically, we’re totally capable of this now.

-- Work with Ventura College on providing library services through the college as well. This could mean things like, publicizing those services the college library does provide that are of value to the community (for example, certain research materials and computers) and seeing whether any services that were provided at Wright (for example, large-print books for senior citizens) could be provided at the college library.

-- Negotiating with the college for ongoing use of the building. Even if the college does take over the Wright Library building, I think it might be possible for the community to still use it for certain things – meetings and events, for example, or maybe even a homework center after school for all the high school kids who go to school nearby. Or perhaps we could provide a pick up and dropoff spot for books ordered by library patrons on line.

These are just a few ideas. As we work through this transition, there will be many others. Just as an example: I am concerned that the Vivian Distin Garden, named for Johnny Cash’s first wife and Roseann Cash’s mother, a longtime Ventura resident, may not survive on the Wright property. But that’s a community asset too.

Over the next few weeks and months, all of us will grieve in our own way. Since it first became apparent that Wright is likely to close, I have visited the library many times – often at night or on Sundays, when it is closed, so I can contemplate what it means to me. I remember all the times my mother volunteered there – and even the July 4th when the librarians let Mom and me join them in their own special area on the Wright property to watch the fireworks. I remember taking my daughter, now 19, to the children’s area when she was two or three – and meeting her after school at Wright when she was in high school. And I remember all the times I spent there reading books, magazines, and newspapers. Someday, different libraries – or even different types of libraries – will be available to all of us. But, as with the Ventura Bookstore, nothing will ever take Wright’s place.

Wright Library: Much To Grieve, But Much To Be Thankful For

As many of you have probably already read, this morning even the Star came up short in its quest to find a way to keep Wright Library open. After running through all the possible ways we in Ventura might come up with the funds to keep Wright open, the Star’s last “Hail Mary” pitch was to put on a Kevin Costner benefit concert.

The Star is not alone in wanting to wave a magic wand to solve Ventura’s library problem. Over the past couple of weeks, I have received and read an extraordinary range of communications about the possible closure of Wright Library. Most people who have contacted me directly have simply expressed great disappointment that the library might close. Many have asked – as the Star did today – why we can’t wave some magic wand to keep the library open. Some have engaged in an almost obsessive analysis of every last dollar in the library budget to prove that Ventura is being short-changed. And a few have accused me of being part of a conspiracy to close the library.

All of these viewpoints are understandable as we work through our collective grief at the closing of a beloved institution. The last thing I want to do is close Wright Library, especially with five pre-paid years left on the lease with Ventura College. As many of you are aware, it has been a part of my family’s life for decades. My daughter -- now in college – grew up there from the time she was a toddler until she graduated from Foothill Technology High School across the street. My mother is still remembered lovingly by the Wright staff as a dedicated volunteer.

Unfortunately, for 15 years as we have struggled to keep Wright open, we have not reached a community consensus on how to deal with the most basic problem: If we are going to maintain our current level of library service, we will have to provide more money from our community to do so. Again and again, our community has expressed a strong wish to keep Wright open. Unlike many of our surrounding communities, however, Venturans have chosen not provide the augmented funding needed to keep it open.

And so now, with libraries as with so many other public services, we face a difficult choice. We have to live within our means. That means cutting back our library service to a level that will be financially sustainable for the next few years while we determine how to create a solid long-term foundation for excellent library service in the future.

Even though the underlying facts are grim, as Thanksgiving approaches I believe we have an awful lot to be thankful for on the library front in Ventura. Even if Wright closes as scheduled next week, we as a community are endowed with great gifts that can help maintain library service for now and create great libraries in the future.

First, we should be thankful for all of the people and organizations that have allowed us to have more than 40 years of continuous library service at Day and Telegraph.

Over the years, our community has benefited from the remarkable generosity of others in building and maintaining Wright. We must have everlasting thanks to Helen P. Wright herself and to Ventura College, which has agreed to forego the use of their property for more than 40 years so that Wright could be available to the public. In our thanks, we must also remember the remarkable efforts of the San Buenaventura Friends of the Library, not only for their heroic efforts in keeping Wright open this year but for their dedication day in and day out to ensure that all our Ventura libraries have enough money for new books. I’m thankful for the Ventura Auto Dealers Association, which provided almost $70,000 to bail Wright out one year; and my colleagues and predecessors on the City Council, who committed $50,000 to $100,000 several times (during a better economy) to do the same. Finally, I’m thankful for my colleagues on the County Library Services Commission, who agreed for more than a decade to provide subsidies from countywide and state funds so we could keep Wright open.

But now, tax revenue for the city, the county, the library system, and the state are all in decline and will continue to go down for the foreseeable future; all these government agencies are cutting back on everything from salaries to paper clips. Private donors such as the car dealers are struggling to stay in business, and the faithful Friends – after raising an amazing $100,000 in five months – are tapped out and exhausted.

Second, we should be thankful that we have E.P. Foster Library to fall back on – and we should be especially thankful that the City and private donors paid for a major renovation and expansion only ten years ago.

Yes, Wright is more centrally located than Foster, and parking is easier there. But the fact is that it is a third the size of Foster. Foster may not be in a convenient location for many people, but it is the only building we currently have that is capable of serving as a large, central library.

I don’t favor the alternating days idea. It was confusing and frustrating the last time we tried it, back in the early ‘90s. We will have two locations, which is more convenient for patrons, but many of our materials are unavailable to the patrons at any given time. And because we still have to operate both buildings, it doesn’t save that much money.

That means we have to consolidate library service in one location – at either Wright of Foster.

Close Wright in order to consolidate at Foster, and we can easily move all the materials, personnel, and programs (including the popular Paws for Reading) to Foster. We lose a convenient location, but we retain the guts of our library service. We have a solid foundation to build on in the future.

But close Foster in order to consolidate at Wright, and we lose most of the library materials located here in Ventura. Because Wright is not big enough to accommodate more materials, most of the books accumulated over many generations here in Ventura will be distributed to libraries in other cities. We lose dozens of computers that are in use from morning till night every day – a vital resource for our community at a time when so many people are looking for jobs. We lose the genealogy room. We lose the guts of our library service here in Ventura – and it will be almost impossible to rebuild it, ever.

So we should be thankful that our predecessors on the City Council, at the library agency, and at the Friends of the Library had the foresight, a decade ago, to expend more than $2 million in tax funds and private donations to renovate and expand Foster. A dozen years ago, when I was first appointed to the city’s Library Advisory Commission, many people wanted Foster torn down. It was old, cramped, poorly ventilated, and uncomfortable. But the second floor was opened up for public library use for the first time ever, and the entire building was renovated.. Now, we are able to consolidate our library service in a building that is in good shape – airy, comfortable, spacious. It’s far from perfect – it’s not a fabulous building, like Camarillo’s new library or even Oxnard’s downtown library – but we are lucky to have such a well-renovated library to fall back on in these hard times. The choices would be far more grim if Foster’s renovation had not occurred a decade ago.

Third, we should be thankful that Ventura’s libraries have dedicated funding of about $2 million a year that can’t be used for anything else.

The $2 million total is not nearly as much as we would like, obviously. But it’s $2 million that goes straight to the library agency for use in Ventura, derived from the property taxes that people in the Ventura area pay each year. This money can’t be diverted by the city or the county to any other use.

To my mind, what this means is that, if we consolidate library service at Foster, we have temporarily fallen back to a fiscally sustainable level of library service. Our libraries will have taken an enormous hit. But we will be in the position of saying that we are now living within our means, and no further service cuts are acceptable.

And fourth, we should be thankful for Ventura’s library advocates – strong, passionate, and giving – because we are going to need their brains, their passion, and their effort going forward.

The whole battle to keep Wright open has reminded us that Ventura is endowed with creative, passionate, and committed library advocates. This is our greatest community asset as we move forward and try to shape a strong future for libraries in our community.

The truth is that libraries are in transition, and we cannot be sure what they will look like – or precisely how they will deliver library services – in the future. Increasingly, the role of providing library services is divorced from the physical location of the library. So as we move forward we have to figure out how best to provide services in a cost-effective manner, and what type of physical locations are required for libraries and other community services.

Even as our library system has struggled with budget cuts, we have made tremendous strides in providing library services online. With a library card from your own computer, you can already access many databases that would be too expensive for individuals, and even download e-books and audio books. Soon, you might even be able to load your Kindle with an e-book at a library kiosk anywhere in town – just like going to the ATM.

But libraries are still important as community gathering places too. That’s why the loss of Wright is so huge to the surrounding neighborhood. As we move forward as a community, we will also have to make some decisions about the physical location of libraries. Should there by just one big one, as there is in Camarillo? Should we have many small libraries? Can we afford many small libraries – or should we combine library service with senior services, youth services, and many other possible services on a neighborhood level for cost-effectiveness?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do know we will need all the brains, all the dedication, and all the passion we can must in the months and years ahead to figure out. And so the last thing that I am thankful for is the dedication and creativity of the people serving right now on our city’s library task force, who are charged with figuring out what the future of Ventura’s libraries will look like. If you want to know move about task force, you can contact Peter Brown at pbrown@ci.ventura.ca.us.

There is much to grieve over in the likely closure of Wright Library. But there is much to be thankful for in this community that has always been so dedicated to libraries – and, I’m sure, will continue to be in the future.