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.

Chief Miller's Last Shift

At about 9 o’clock this morning, a big Ventura Police Department SUV pulled up in front of my house on Anacapa Street in Midtown. I hope it didn’t scare my neighbors into thinking something had gone awry on Christmas morning. In fact, it was just Police Chief Pat Miller picking me up. Today was Pat’s last day on the job, and – along with a reporter and a photographer from the Star – I decided to ride along with him on his last shift.

The fact that Pat was working the beat on Christmas Day on the last day of his career is a testament to Pat and to the humane approach he has instilled in the Police Department. By longstanding tradition, the senior brass at Ventura PD work shifts on Christmas Day so that the younger officers can celebrate Christmas with their families. Today, Pat was working half a shift – 6 a.m to noon. – before heading home to be with his family. (Ventura PD officers work 12-hour shifts, 6 am to 6 pm or vice versa.)

It was mostly a quiet morning, interrupted only by a few typical domestic disputes. (“They don’t see each other all year long,” Pat joked, “and then they wake up on Christmas morning and realize they don’t like each other.”) Pat was assigned to the citywide beat, which meant he roamed all the way from Ventura Avenue to Victoria Avenue. It was clear that almost every street, almost every block, held some memory for him – good ones and bad ones.

Like every cop on every shift, he drove down Olive Street on the Avenue to figuratively tip his cap to the heroic Dee Dowell, who was killed there in 1978 -- the first Ventura police officer ever to be killed in the line of duty. And driving past De Anza Middle School reminded him of the time he spent all day with a distraught 13-year-old who finally revealed that she’d been molested by a relative; 15 years later, the girl – now a woman – called up Pat Miller to thank him, because he had been the person who helped her face her demons and turn her life around.

Pat was clearly born to be a cop. His family moved to Ventura when he was in high school, and at the age of 21 he went to work as a police officer in San Fernando, where his father was also a cop. In 1981, he switched over to the Ventura Police Department and he’s been here ever since.

The low-key older guy driving around in the police SUV talks calmly but with authority about his life and his career and his police work. Much of what he says is sobering. There was his first day on the job in San Fernando, when a fellow officer was killed and he worked the crime scene all day. There was the time when he knocked on a door and, for no particular reason, stepped a few inches to one side. The guy inside had a gun and shot right through the door; if Pat hadn’t moved, he’d have been hit and maybe killed. There was his recollection that the guy who sat in front of him and the guy who sat behind him in the police academy both were killed in the line of duty. And then there was his former partner Mark Riddering, who battled Lou Gehrig’s Disease for 13 years before finally passing away.

All these stories are told in a very matter-of-fact tone as the SUV tools around Ventura, interspersed with the occasional moment when his street antenna went on the alert – like the moment near my office at Main and the Avenue, when two guys scrambled out of a beat-up old car and left quickly because they apparently didn’t want to be seen by a cop.

Like all cops, Pat is always on the beat and loves chasing bad guys best. I can recall a time three or four years ago when I was waiting to meet him and he never showed up. It turned out that he had chased a bad guy all the way to Oxnard, then ran after him – Pat in his street clothes – only to be bitten by Oxnard PD’s K-9 dog. But that’s Pat. He always wants to be in the middle of the action.

And like a lot of cops, Pat has a great dark sense of humor. Always blunt, he is never funnier than when he is “telling it like it is,” even when that’s not the most politic thing to do. A few months ago, at a City Council meeting, after we had spent many hours hashing out consecutive items about regulating massage parlors, dealing with medical marijuana dispensaries, and considering whether to let homeless people catch some winks in their automobiles under highly supervised conditions, Pat broke the council chamber up – at midnight or so – by saying into the microphone, “Sure, come to Ventura – get a massage, smoke a joint, and sleep in your car!” So far our tourist bureau hasn’t picked up on Pat’s slogan.

To me, however, there’s far more to Pat than the passionate beat cop and the police officer with the dry sense of humor. After all, here’s a guy who’s a member of the President’s Homeland Security Advisory Council; he teaches homeland security courses at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Beyond that, of course, there are three other things about Pat which – combined with the beat cop’s passion – make Chief Miller one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.

The first is his passion for preventing crimes as well as solving them. Nobody has been more forceful in arguing for crime prevention programs that Pat has. Gang prevention programs, police officers in the schools, after-school programs – Pat has advocated for all of these ideas and more, often when it meant taking resources away from his men on the beat. That’s because he has always believed in “community policing”. Our cops are not an occupying force that drives by in armored vehicles. They are people you know, people you trust, people who help you and your neighbors and your kids. It’s a lot better for everybody – including the police -- if the teenager at risk stays out of trouble in the first place. Pat knows that you have to be both a cop and a social worker to keep Ventura safe.

The second is the way his leadership style focuses on results. Pat always says that if you can’t say what you’re after in 20 words or less, you’ve failed. He usually succeeds, and this no-nonsense style has helped him set clear goals and motivate his officers to achieve them. In doing this, he focuses – as police departments so often do these days – on tangible and measurable results. His proudest accomplishment is simply that crime has gone down while he’s been chief. But it takes meeting many other statistical targest to meet that larger goal.

For example, under Pat’s leadership, the Ventura PD set a goal of responding to major calls within 5 minutes 90% of the time. When he set the goal, the department hit the 5-minute response time 50% of the time. Now, with no appreciable increase in resources, it’s 80%. Pat may be a beat cop at heart, but he understands how to use information and numbers and goals to get the job done, and I admire that.

The last thing is just his sheer determination. There’s no brick wall this guy won’t walk through when he’s determined to do something. (When I asked him whether seeing a fellow officer killed his first day on the job made him angry, he answered: “No, just more determined.”) Pat played a major role in our attempt to pass a tax increase in 2006 to fund public safety because he had more passion and more determination than anybody else. With our Fire Chief, Mike Lavery, Pat made more than 300 presentations about the sales tax. And he knew how to boil it down to 20 words or less: A nickel on every $20 purchase to stay safe. We didn’t win – but we got 62% of the vote and I think people are much more attuned to public safety in Ventura than ever before.

About 10:45, we responded to an accident at Five Points. Not exactly a fender-bender, either; an SUV slammed into a sedan, the damage on the right side of the sedan is pretty nasty, and ambulances are required for both the driver of the SUV, who can’t turn his head, and the passenger in the sedan, who looks like she hurt her shoulder. Almost first on the scene, Pat goes to both injured folks, puts his arm on them, makes sure their injuries are not extremely serious. Once the paramedics arrive, he backs off and lets other do their job. There he is, the chief of police, one hour away from retirement, standing on Main Street directing traffic as the ambulances pull away.

Back at the police station on Dowell Drive (yes, named for Dee Dowell), Pat greets his daughter Nicole, a veteran dispatcher who’s going on duty at noon. (She had to wait for him to retire to be rehired, since a department head can’t hire relatives.) At just before noon, Nicole puts on her headset, and Pat heads out to the SUV with Ken Corney, his longtime assistant chief, who will take over as chief as soon as Pat steps down.

Pat sits down in the driver’s seat of the SUV, picks up the microphone and says, “151 – 10-C – 10-7.” 151 is his badge number. 10-C means he’s the chief. 10-7 means he’s checked out.

He stands up and Ken Corney grabs the mike. “199 – 10-C – 10-8.” 199 is Ken’s bad number. 10-8 means he’s ready to go. And 10-C means that Ken, not Pat, is now the chief.

Which seems fine with Pat. He shakes everybody’s hand, thanks them all, cracks a joke, and drives away, ready for some new challenge in life.

Thanks, Pat. It’s been a privilege to ride with you – not just today, but for the last 5 years.

You can download Pat's "final 10-7" here.

Recession In the Pocketbook, Depression In the Soul

To the extent that a politician ever gets a day off, mine is Saturday. Every week is a tough slog these days; in addition to the bruising council schedule, my day job is also demanding, and I often travel elsewhere in California late in the week.

This week I got back to Ventura at 8:30 Friday night after being gone since 5 o'clock Tuesday morning. I waslooking forward to my typical “day off” on Saturday – a trip to the Farmers Market, the dry cleaners, Target, Trader Joe’s. A day to feel like a typical person.

Here’s what happened:

At the Farmers Market, I ran into a devoted constituent who is very active in the library issue and talked to me for a long time ago different ways to keep Wright Library open. She was, by turns, angry, fearful, concerned, confused, and full of ideas.

On my way to Target I stopped off across the street at Fire Station #5 and chatted with firefighters about how the pending budget cuts might affect them. They were, by turns, angry, fearful, concerned, confused, and full of ideas.

While checking out at Trader Joe’s I talked with the cashier and an elderly lady standing in line about how bad the parking was and how much worse it might get if Wal-Mart moves in next door. Though opposed by many people for many reasons – including, apparently, this elderly constituent concerned about parking – Wal-Mart would appear to be one of the few vehicles for the city to obtain more revenue in the short run.

So it was not exactly a relaxing day off. I reconnected with my town and my constituents, but they are all understandably anxious that things are bad and getting worse. The things they cherish about their community – their neighborhood library, easy parking at Trader Joe’s, quick response times from firefighters and police officers – all seem at risk.

And all this is happening at a time when we are all afraid of what is going to happen to us personally. Will we lose our jobs? Will our wages be cut? Our health insurance? Will we ever be able to retire? I am very fortunate – I made a good amount of money, more than most people – but I am scared too. I feel at risk in my personal and business life just like everybody else.

The months ahead will not be easy. Starting tomorrow night (Monday), we on the City Council will start eliminating positions and possibly even laying people off. Over the next couple of months, we will be making even more severe cuts in city services – cuts that people will inevitably feel, even if we try to blunt the impact. We may well ask the voters for an increase in the sales tax. But even if it passes, that won’t generate enough money to restore all the services we have now. So we will be faced with terrible choices. Do we want to lay off police officers in order to keep the libraries open? Shall we close the parks or stop paving the streets? Shut down a fire station or stop servicing our vehicles?

Nobody wants to make these kinds of choices, whether it’s in government, in our private businesses, or in our personal finances. And it’s been very, very hard for all of us to face up to what has to be done. Whenever I’ve talked to people around town about making cuts in their favorite service, they’ve reacted all kinds of ways. Many have simply insisted this can’t be happening. Some have yelled at me. Others have insisted that there must be some other way – cutting back on paper clips, firing the overpaid top managers, cutting somebody else’s favorite program. Others have been combing through government budgets trying to prove that money is wasted. Many have suggested that I cut my own salary as a City Councilmember. (I’d happily do so, but that fat $7,200 per year is set in the City Charter and can’t be changed without a vote. By the way, it’s hasn’t gone up in 35 years.)

The truth is that at this point we could do all these things and probably the budget still wouldn’t be balanced. And, whether we like to admit it or not, next year’s going to get worse. Anything we save this year might only be getting a reprieve.

As I have talked to constituents over the past few weeks, I have been recalling the five stages of grieving laid out in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s famous book On Death and Dying, which I first read in college more than 30 years ago. The five stages were meant to be applied to grieving over the death of a loved one (or one’s own mortality). But as it turns out, they can be applied to the grieving process you go through whenever you suffer any kind of loss. The recent loss of our prosperity – and the consequences for both our personal life and our civic life – means not just a loss of material things but also a loss of confidence and a loss of our sense of well-being. In dealing with constituents – and dealing with my own feelings about the current financial situation – I have come to recognize all five stages of grief, which area:

Denial: "This can't be happening, not to me!"

Anger: "Who is to blame?"

Bargaining: "I'll do anything for a few more years!"

Depression: "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"

Acceptance: "It's going to be okay."

In both our personal lives and our civic life, many of us have been in denial. This library can’t be closing! A lot of people have moved on to anger, which is why I get yelled at so much. It’s all the City Council’s fault! Or it's the fault of the stupid library director, who should be fired! Many people are stuck there, but I notice a bunch of constituents moving on to bargaining. Let’s raise enough money just to keep the library open for a year, and then maybe things will improve!

Maybe because our city’s financial woes have been coming on for a while, I guess I feel like I have worked through those first three and right now I’m at depression. Things are awful. Why bother continuing to make them better? That’s how I feel a lot of the time these days.

But I also know that people have faced tough times before. I’m trying my best to move toward acceptance. Acceptance is liberating, because it makes you realize that some things are going to happen that you can’t control. We are less prosperous than we were a year or two ago. We will have less money to make things happen. This means we will have to endure some cutbacks; but it also means we will have to use the money we have more creatively, and come up with solutions nobody has tried before.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hope things will get better – nor does it mean we shouldn’t campaign for a sales tax measure if the Council decides to put it on the ballot this year. But it does mean that, tax or no tax, we will have to pull together as a community, both to accept the loss that we are going to feel and to turn things around so our community is successful again. It’s hard to work through the five stages of grief in a situation like this. But people – and communites like Ventura – are very resilient. And that gives me hope.

Why We're Giving The Firefighters A Raise

As you may have heard by now, next Monday (8/4), the City Council is scheduled to approve a new contract with our city firefighters than includes both a raise and an increase in their pension benefits.

In such a bad budget year, I’m sure this will come as a shocker to most people. After all, this new contract will cost us more than $1 million per year. And I think I know what the reaction will be:

How dare they, especially after imposing the 911 fee?

They should be cutting spending, not increasing it! No wonder they need all that fee money!

The firefighters’ pensions are already pretty cushy!

It’s just payback to the firefighters union for campaign contributions!

All fair comments. But there are very good reasons why we are giving the firefighters a better deal – even in a bad budget year when we increased fees on lot of other things.

Most people think we’re just cutting the budget. But we’re doing more than that. At the same time that we are restraining spending, we’re also reprioritizing how the money is spent, so it goes to higher-priority items.

And the Fire Department is a high priority – one that is at risk if we don’t improve the compensation package. No matter what I or anybody else thinks about how good our firefighters have it, we’ve fallen far behind Ventura County, Oxnard, and Santa Barbara in both pay and pensions. In dealing with the future of our Fire Department, we have three choices:

-- Pay through the nose to merge with Ventura County Fire. Because the County pays better than the City does – and because they have no motivation to merge except on their terms – this would cost a fortune. The Fire Department currently costs us $20 million a year. Merging with County Fire would probably cost us $30 million a year.

-- Resign ourselves to being a “farm team”. We could not improve the compensation package – or we could even cut the pensions and salaries – but the net result would be a much lower-quality department. We might have to give up the requirement that firefighters be emergency medical technicians; and we’d probably lose most of our promising recruits to the county after a couple of years. In other words, our city firefighters would be younger and greener, kind of the like the ambulance technicians in town.

-- Invest some money in improving compensation in order to stay competitive. We don’t have to gold-plate our Fire Department to compete with the County. People like working for our Fire Department. All we have to do invest enough money that good people come to work for us and then stay. That’s what we’re trying to do with this new contract.

Earlier this year, we made a deliberate decision not to simply cut the budget across the board. We decided we were not going to sacrifice our goal of raising salaries and benefits in key areas where we knew we were far behind. Instead, we identified things the City couldn’t justify spending money on and eliminated those instead.

In other words, part of the reason we worked so hard to cut the budget this year was that we would have enough money for high-priority items like firefighter salaries.

Also – and I know a lot of people won’t believe me when I say this – we’re not using the 911 fee money to give the firefighters a raise. That money is reserved for hiring additional police officers and firefighters so that we cut reduce the response times to 911 calls. We didn’t even include the 911 money in the 2008-2009 budget. The money that we are using to provide the firefighters with a new contract is coming out of the money we already have – the increases in property tax revenue that we have obtained over the last year, plus the money we cut from other programs.

I wish all this were easier to accomplish, but it’s not. Remember that since I took office, we’ve faced a series of fiscal challenges.

First, we had to erase a $9 million budget deficit dating back to the 2003-04 fiscal year. We set a goal of balancing the budget in three years, then did it in two. And we’ve made tough cuts this year to keep the budget balanced even as our actual revenue has gone down.

Second, we had to add police officers and firefighters without the benefit of the sales tax revenue from Measure P6, which failed (with 62% of the vote!) in 2006. We used all of our 2007-08 property tax revenue growth to add the first group of officers. And we will use the 911 fee revenue to add many more, focusing on increasing response time.

We’re not out of the woods yet. It’ll be a while before the economy turns around, and we’re likely to see one or two more years of stagnant revenue in the meantime. And we all know that we have to work hard to get more revenue – especially more sales tax revenue – in order to stay competitive. That’s why we’re working so hard on downtown, on trying to bring retail back to the north end of the Pacific View Mall, on adding auto dealers at the auto center, and on targeting specific retailers we want like Best Buy.

But I’m proud of what we’ve done. I think we have our priorities straight – balance budget and have an outstanding public safety force – and I hope we can stay competitive in the future.

Why We Adopted the 911 Fee

As everybody in the world knows by now, last night Ventura became the first city in Southern California to adopt an access fee on telephones to help pay for our 911 call center.

It’s been splashed all over the newspapers and featured on the 11 o’clock news. Driving through Midtown on my way home from last night’s City Council meeting, I saw Patrick Healy of Channel 4 setting up his “live shot” in front of Pizza Chief on Main Street. Why there? He needed a pay phone as a prop – and how many pay phones are there anymore?

The 911 access fee would place a charge of $1.49 per month -- $17.88 per year – on every telephone line in Ventura, including landlines and cell phones. Individual telephone users will have the option to instead pay a fee of $50 every time they call 911. This, of course, is the controversial part – but it’s important to note that no telephone user will be charged $50 for a call unless they have selected that option in writing in advance.

I voted in favor of the 911 access fee because I think it will help us accomplish two goals.

First, it will help the City pay for a very important but expensive operation, the 911 call center. The 911 service is required by state law. Many years ago the state promised to help local governments find a way to pay for this service, but this has not happened. One of the reasons we did not add police officers or firefighters between 1990 and 2006 was because of the added cost of the 911 center. In fact, it has taken cops off the street to supervise the call center.

And second, it will – with other steps we are taking – free up money to hire more police officers and firefighters. In 2006, we asked the voters to approve Measure P6, a one-quarter-percent increase in local sales tax to add 14 police officers and 11 firefighters. The measure got 62% -- but it required two-thirds. What we kept hearing was, find another way to do this without raising our taxes. Thanks to the 911 fee and other steps, we should be able to hire 12 new police officers and 6 new firefighters within a year or two – about two-thirds of the way toward the goal we set in 2006.


Expanding Public Safety Staff

It’s quite true that discussion of the 911 fee emerged after P6 was defeated.

We spend about half of our general fund budget for police and fire. (Most of the rest goes to public works.) As I said above, the message we got from P6 was, increasing police and fire staff was really important – but find another way to do it. We knew we had to do something. Our public safety force is stretched so thin we are not making our goal of 5-minute response times. It doesn’t do much good to have a great 911 call center if we don’t have enough people to actually go out and respond to the calls.

So the first thing we did, in the 2007-08 budget, was earmark all the additional money we had available for more police officers and firefighters – six officers and three firefighters, to be exact. To do this, we squeezed all the other departments and told them to hold the line. For the first time since 1990, we are going to have a bigger police department and a bigger fire department. We now spend 54% of our General Fund on police and fire, rather than 50%, as we used to.

I was hoping we could do this again for one more year, but our revenues are lagging behind projections. The real estate boom is over, and increases in property tax revenue have been cut in half, to about 5% per year. Within a year or two they’ll be at zero until the real estate bust is over. Meanwhile, sales tax revenue is flat. This situation is not unique to Ventura. Every city in the county – indeed, in the state – is facing almost exactly the same trend on both property tax and sales tax.

But we also knew that, in the long run, we would probably need more revenue to bring police and fire staffing up to the levels where we needed them. So last year, we on the City Council asked the staff to come up with some alternatives. Back in December, we looked at a variety of choices, including another run at the sales tax, imposing additional taxes on new development, and other things. We decided that a 911 fee would be the fairest way to increase revenue.


Paying for the 911 Call Center

We get over 50,000 911 calls per year. That’s an increase of more than 250% since 1990.

The 911 system is very expensive. It involves a lot of capital cost, because you have to have really great, reliable equipment, and it involves a lot of labor cost, because you have to have lots of dispatchers and supervisors on hand all the time. Our call center currently costs a little more than $3 million a year to run. That’s not including the capital cost. Most of the money goes to the salaries of the 12 dispatchers, 4 police corporals, and 1 police sergant who work there full-time. Two to four dispatchers are on duty at all times, and one corporal is one duty from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week.

It’s important to have our own dispatchers because it’s really, really important for them to know our local geography intimately. (And, of course, you have to have a surprlus on hand so you don't get a busy signal.) You can’t do this remotely; it slows things down, and even a few seconds is vital on a 911 call. It’s also important to have the police corporal on duty because that you have to have somebody capable of making decisions instantaneously about how to respond to the call. Responding with too few people can put a police officer at risk; responding with too many can mean there aren’t enough people left for the next call

As I said above, the 911 system was mandated by the state under a state law passed in 1986. At that time, the state promised to work with the local governments to come up with a funding source to help pay for a system that everybody knew would be very, very expensive to operate.

And, in fact, the state does levy a 911 fee on each phone line – as a number of our constituents have pointed out. This fee is tiny – only a few cents a month – and it is devoted to the capital cost of the telecommunications equipment, not operations.

But the state never followed through in its promise to work with the local governments in finding a way to pay for the 911 system. (In fact, not long after the 911 law was passed, the state shifted the allocation property tax in a way that is unfavorable to the city – we get several million dollars a year less than we otherwise would.)

I’m pretty confident that if the state had followed through on its promise to work with the local governments to create a funding source, it would have looked a lot like the 911 access fee we passed last night. But since the state never did anything, we had to do something.


$1.49 per month and $50 per call

The fee will work like this:

* It’ll be $1.49 per month for every phone line billed to a Ventura address, cell phone or land line.
* Low-income lifeline customers will be exempt.
* Businesses with “trunk lines” (one phone line that leads to a switching system) will be charged for three phone lines.

This is designed to generate about $2 million to $2.5 million per year – or, in any event, no more than 85% of the cost of the 911 call center. The money will not be in the General Fund. Because it’s a fee, it will be in a separate fund that can only be used to pay for the 911 call center.

There’s a provision that says that that the city must continue to spend the same amount of General Fund money on public safety. In other words, we can’t reduce public safety spending because we’re now getting money from the 911 fee.

The controversial part was the option of paying $50 per call. Here’s how that works:

* If you don’t want to pay $1.49 per month, you don’t have to. You can fill out a form instead informing the city that you want to pay $50 per call instead. Nobody will be charged $50 unless they have notified the city in advance that they have chosen this option.

* There’s a “Good Samaritan” clause that gives the Police Department discretion to waive the fee if you’re helping out a neighbor or calling in a very serious crime.

* People can switch back to the $1.49 per month fee at any time.

Why $50? It’s 85% of the cost of processing each 911 call.

The fee-per-call idea emerged for two reasons.

The first was to help strengthen the legality of the fee. These fees have been challenged in court by telephone companies in Northern California. Most of the time they are winning. Our City Attorney, Ariel Calonne, believes that by giving telephone customers two options, the fee is less vulnerable in court.

But there’s another, very practical reason: Not everybody uses all their telephone lines for voice communication. Many uses their lines for faxes, computers, and other things like that. By choosing the fee-per-call, you can ensure that you won’t be whacked for access to a service you’re not going to use.

We could simply exempt fax or phone lines, but that would require a cumbersome administrative procedure. People would have to declare that they don’t use their phone line for voice communications; and then we’d have to check and enforce that. This would cost a lot of time and money. By charging a per-call fee, we can ensure that people don’t “game the system” by claiming that their phones are used for fax service. Everybody pays their fair share.


Conclusion

There you go – my rationale for voting in favor of the fee, even the per-call option. Given all the considerations, I think it’s the best option on the table right now. Many people have, as usual, asked why we can’t simply generate more tax revenue by allowing more big retail stores in town. (We heard the same argument on P6.) The answer is: We must do both. We have a number of important locations where we must make sure that there is good, high-quality retail that serves our community and also generates tax revenue – downtown, the north end of the mall site, the Kmart site, the auto center. Each of these locations has potential. But it takes a long time to attract good retailers and put them in place.

We waited 16 years to hire additional police officers and firefighters. I don’t want to wait any longer.