Give Me Plastic Bags Or Give Me Death?

Our split decision on Monday night to pursue ways to reduce plastic bag use in Ventura apparently struck a cord with some folks. The email responses I’ve gotten since then have ranged from “I’m disappointed in you” to “Don’t you have anything better to do?” to “You’re friggin’ nuts” to “Give me plastic bags or give me death!” As the last comment would suggest, many of these comments seem to have come from self-described Tea Party activists. A lot of the comments were very thoughtful and clearly deserve a response.

First, here’s what happened Monday night: After a proposed statewide law on the issue fell apart, Councilmembers Morehouse and Brennan asked us to approve the idea of having the staff prepare a ban on single-use plastic bags in Ventura. I indicated my support (which I will explain below). Councilmembers Andrews and Monahan and Deputy Mayor Tracy indicated their opposition. Councilmember Weir said she would not support a ban, but would support directing the staff to talk to other cities and agencies and return with some options for how we might reduce single-use plastic bags here in Ventura. That motion passed 4-3. So we didn’t ban plastic bags, nor did we – as many emailers seem to think – approve spending money on some kind of study or other. We asked the staff to come back with options.

A lot of emailers have expressed concern about having their personal freedom taken away through a ban on plastic bags – sort of implying that it is the manifestation of an intrusive “nanny state” approach by the City Council and basically just the latest left-wing enviro-nazi fad.

Let me first say that I’m usually pretty skeptical about buying into the latest environmental fad. Remember a few years ago when the entertainment industry was in a tizzy over the supposedly wasteful long CD covers? I thought that was pretty amusing – here are Hollywood musicians, who consume enormous amounts of electricity recording and playing their music and still use lots of plastic to manufacture and shrink-wrap the CDs, thinking that if only they make shorter boxes the environment will be saved. So I’m not easily taken in by this stuff.

Second, I don’t take imposing regulation on our constituents lightly. A lot of emailers have said that we should allow the consumer and the market to prevail. I agree that the market is a great thing – most of the time the market is right, and we should use the market to deal with our problems whenever we can. But sometimes, the market has a hard time recognizing other, non-economic issues. That’s when the government creates regulation – to protect other things that are important to the common good but that the market isn’t good at dealing with. This might be something as simple as a stop sign or a speed limit (both of which are examples of government regulations that take away our personal freedom) or something as complicated as environmental protection.

There’s no question that plastic bags are cheap and useful. But if they are floating around our town – and, especially, landing in our rivers and our oceans – they can be harmful. Just as important, their presence in our rivers and watercourses can expose our community – and our taxpayers – to the possibility of significant financial fines from the Regional Water Quality Control Board. And that’s the most important reason to think about ways to reduce plastic bag use in Ventura.

The regional water board oversees the implementation of the federal Clean Water Act. Because Ventura is located in a beautiful but environmentally fragile place – along the beach and between two environmentally sensitive rivers – the board keeps a very close eye on us. This costs us a lot of time and it also costs us a lot of money.

Here’s an example: Our wastewater treatment plant discharges water – very clean water – into the estuary at the mouth of the Santa Clara River, near Ventura Harbor. But discharging treated wastewater into an estuary is not typically something that is permitted under the Clean Water Act. So we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year – money that comes from the water and sewer payments you make every other month – proving to the regional board that the water we discharge is really, really clean. Whenever we do have a minor blip and polluted water is accidentally discharged into the estuary, we pay a big fine – thousands of dollars a day. And now, a group of environmental organizations have sued us in an effort to get us to find some other way to discharge the water rather than putting it in the estuary. This lawsuit will cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend and most likely millions to settle.

As I say, this kind of thing is just a fact of life. It’s part of the “cost of doing business” of being Ventura.

Now, the regional water board has instituted a new set of regulations implementing the federal Clean Water Act that seeks to reduce the amount of trash and other pollution in the Ventura River -- to zero. Under the new stormwater permit that affects Ventura and neighboring cities, we are expected to take all reasonable measures necessary to eliminate all trash in the river. If there’s trash in the river, we have to pay fines – with money that will come from our General Fund, meaning we will have less money for police officers and firefighters and park maintenance workers.

And just to give you an example, a couple of weeks ago when volunteers from California Lutheran did the big river-bottom trash cleanout, they came up with more than 12 tons of trash.

In order to cut down on the trash, the City will spend close to $1 million over the next few years putting “trash excluders” on the storm drains – essentially, traps that keep the trash from flowing down the storm drains into the ocean and the river. But trash excluders don’t stop plastic bags from floating around until they land in the river. And plastic bags that get stuck in the trash excluders can interfere with the entire storm drain system by blocking the water from flowing.

In other words, we will face major financial penalties – penalties we would have to pay for with taxpayer funds -- if we don’t eliminate trash in the river. And plastic bags are big part of the problem that are especially difficult to deal with in other ways. That’s why we have to look at ways to reduce their use – including the possibility of banning them.

Now, critics might say that the regional water quality regulators shouldn’t be so hard on us; or shouldn’t focus on trash in the river; or should find other ways to clean up the water. This may be true, but that’s not something we at the city level can do a whole lot about. If we fight or try to ignore these regulations, that’s probably going to cost us far more of your tax money than complying. (This is a lesson the Casitas Municipal Water District has learned the hard way in fighting federal regulators over the installation of a fish ladder farther up the Ventura River to accommodate the now-endangered steelhead trout.)

So, to those who say they are disappointed in me, I say: How disappointed will you be when I come and ask to raise taxes so we can afford to pay all these fines to the Regional Water Quality board? To those who ask if I don’t have anything better to do, I say: I don’t have anything better to do than clean up our environment and conserve our taxpayers’ money in the process. To those who say I’m friggin’ nuts, I say: It would be nuts to pretend that we do not have lots of potential financial liability here.

To those who say, Give me plastic bags or give me death, I say: At least tie your plastic bags up before you throw them into the river so nobody else chokes to death on them. Because if you don’t want regulation, then you’ve got to take individual responsibility for your actions.

Parking Management That Actually Manages Parking

At about 10:30 this morning, I step out of my office at the corner of Poli and Oak and walk down Oak Street to get a cup of coffee at Palermo. Almost immediately, I notice something different.

The parking lot on Oak Street, usually two-thirds empty in the morning, is mostly full. And the on-street parking spaces along Oak and Main Street, which are mostly occupied on a typical morning at this time, are mostly vacant.

It takes me a moment before I realized why: The paid parking portion of our downtown parking management program had gone into effect at 10 a.m., and it was already showing results. People who park all day downtown have moved into the lots and the upper levels of the parking garage. Spaces on the street are now available for shoppers, diners, and others who were running short-term errands. In other words, only 30 minutes after we instituted the parking management program, it is working.

In all the discussions around town this summer about paid parking, the emphasis has always been on the "paid" part. Why is the city charging for parking downtown? Are we just being greedy? Where will the money go? Why would anyone go downtown if they have to pay to park?
These are all fair questions. (And they all have good answers -- for example, all the parking revenue money is going to benefit downtown and not being spent elsewhere in the city.) But the questions have obscured an important goal of the paid parking, which has nothing to do with revenue. The goal is to encourage employees and other long-term parkers downtown in order to free up space on the street for shoppers. And I was stunned at how quickly our "parking management" goal was achieved.

All day, we have a dozen or so police officers, public works officials, police cadets, and police volunteers downtown assisting people. When I go out again at lunchtime, the street spaces are beginning to fill up -- and everywhere I look, somebody from the city is helping a downtown shopper figure out how to use the new machines. But the point is still clear: The on-street spaces are gradually filling up with people who had come downtown to shop.

In the months leading up to the inauguration of paid parking, I kept hearing stories about how downtown employees were hogging the onstreet spaces. I heard that some merchants told their employees to park on the street -- but a block away, so as not to take up parking in front of the store. I heard that some businesses and employees erase the chalk marks that our parking enforcement folks put on their tires. I heard that some business owners give their employees a few minutes off every two hours to move their cars.

Frankly, I wasn't sure if I believed all these stories. After all, why would any merchant park in front of their own store? Why would you deal with all the hassles to park on the street -- erasing chalk, moving cars -- when there's free parking in city lots a half-block away? It seemed ridiculous to me. But the lesson from today is that it's not ridiculous. Obviously, what's been happening is that employees have been parking on the street and now they are parking in the lots.

At about 3 pm, I decide it is time for another cup of coffee at Palermo, partly just to see what was going on. By now most of the onstreet spaces are taken -- but the police volunteers and cadets are still around. A woman wanderes past Palermo and asks me if I know how to use the machines. I start to help her (she seems tickled pink that the mayor is helping her) when a fresh-faced police cadet comes up and does a better job of explaining it.

Anybody's first impulse, I think, is that paying for parking is a bad thing. But upon reflection, a lot of folks -- merchants and shoppers alike -- have come around to the idea that it can be a good thing.

Some shoppers have complained over the past few months that parking at the mall is free, so why should they pay to park downtown? The answer -- provided by Downtown Ventura Organization board chair Dave Armstrong -- is that you're paying for access to a few hundred premium spaces. And he's right. After all, all the mall parking spaces are far away from the stores -- farther than even the most remote free lot downtown. If it was possible to drive right inside the mall and park in front of your favorite store, don't you think the mall would charge for that space? And don't you think some people who think it's worth it would pay the price? Obviously, the answer to both these questions is yes.

Similarly, Main Street merchants have come to see that paid parking can help them too by opening up short-term spaces close to their store. As the owner of Jersey Mike's told me today, her customers used to have to circle the block three times looking for a space or park in a faraway parking lot. Now they can park right in front of her shop for a quarter -- or a dime -- or a nickel -- while they pick up their order. Because even though it's $1 for the first hour, you can buy less time with coins. And there's less traffic on the street because there's less "cruising" for a parking space.

6 pm: I head out to one our local establishments. Now it's very busy downtown -- the younger crowd is beginning to head out to downtown -- and the onstreet spaces are still mostly full. Prime time downtown.

Some people who grumbled about this idea pointed to the experience this summer at Ventura Harbor: Paid parking was instituted in the prime lot near the Village on weekends. But, the complainers pointed out, the Harbor ended the program early because they didn't achieve their revenue goals. True enough, but it was a gloomy summer and tourist business was off generally. And what the complainers tend to overlook is the fact that the Harbor actually did meet the parking management goals. Employees and all-day parkers going to the Channel Islands parked elsewhere, freeing up plenty of space for peope shopping at the Village. In that sense, it was a success.

9:15 pm. I take one final swing through downtown. Parking on the street is fairly light now -- especially on California between Santa Clara and Thompson (near the garage) and on other side streets such as Oak. And it's a fairly quiet Tuesday night -- most places. I peek into Anacapa Brewing to talk to owner Danny Saldana -- and, to my amazement, the place is completely full. Danny is happy with the situation and, like many other downtown business owners, says he is providing one-hour parking coupons to his regular customers for free. It's well worth it, he says, to keep them coming.

I walk back up Oak Street toward the office. The spaces on the street are mostly empty. And the parking lot across from office -- usually almost empty by now -- is completely full. Eleven hours later and it's still working.

Safe Housing in Ventura

Yesterday I attended the Safe Housing Collaborative's open house and workshop at Cabrillo Middle School. Safe housing and code enforcement has been a significant issue here in Ventura over the last year or two -- not surprising considering we are an older city with an older housing stock.

The meeting yesterday was terrific. I would say about 80 people showed up. The Safe Housing Collaborative -- a City Council-appointed group chaired by Jill Martinez -- did a terrific job of pulling things together and organizing the event. At the workshop, the participants were broken down into small tables and they discussed housing and code enforcement issues at length.

I'm looking forward to hearing what the Safe Housing Collaborative took away from the day. There were a lot of comments -- some angry, but most constructive. I tried to move from table to table to get a broad understanding of what people were saying, and here's what I heard most frequently:

1. Our permit fees are too high. (We have been increasing some fees in order to ensure that taxpayers don't subsidize building fees and code enforcement fines.)

2. To bring costs down, we should allow permit applicants or contractors to "self-certify" that the code has been met. (This is one of several options we've been discussing.)

3. We should focus on safety issues and not worry so much about other things that are technically substandard. ("Substandard" is defined in the state code and is pretty expansive.)

4. Our building inspectors and code enforcement officers sometimes have an attitude and/or don't demonstrate evenhandedness. (As I have no personal experience with this, I don't know if this is true or not.)

Anyway, these were the four things I heard pretty consistently.

You can get involved in the Safe Housing Collaborative discussion by joining the Safe Housing Ventura Yahoo group.

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.

Shop Ventura

Everybody should buy local. It's good for local businesses, it increases local tax revenue, and it makes people feel good about their community. Here in Ventura, we're working on putting together a comprehensive "buy local" campaign. There are many buy local campaigns already in place, and we're working with them, with the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Ventura Organization, and other groups. But there are many approaches to "buy local," and we want to make sure we get it right.

During the current recession, there's been a revival of "buy local" campaigns all over the country, especially as sales of big-ticket, big-tax items such as automobiles have been on the decline. Some cities have simply tried to raise awareness. If you shop in the next town, you're paying the salaries of their police officers, not ours. Others have taken more aggressive steps, giving gift cards or rebates for local car purchases. Yet there's one common theme: As retail sales has gone into steep decline in the last few years, jurisdictions nationwide have realized that they can't take sales tax for granted.

For the past 30 years, the favored approach of California cities to pursuing more sales tax has been to attract more retailers--often with deep subsidies. In some cases, property tax increment financing was used to subsidize auto dealerships and shopping malls, with the hope of generating a sales-tax payoff. In other cases, cities simply split the sales tax increases with the retailers.

The recent recession has rendered these models outdated, at least for the moment. No increment in property taxes has occurred because property values have been falling, and there has been no increase in sales tax to share.

Nevertheless, some localities continue to subsidize their big retailers to keep them afloat. In May, the Long Beach, Calif., City Council approved a loan to legendary Ford dealer Cal Worthington of $600,000 to keep him going--and stay in town. Other cities may face similarly difficult choices as the auto manufacturing industry contracts.

Other localities have taken a different but equally aggressive approach. Some cities have simply set aside a slug of money to give rebates to people who buy-in their town-big-ticket items like cars. Others have worked with their retailers to offer gift cards: Buy a car, get a gift card worth several hundred dollars for other retailers in town.

In general, these buy local campaigns--or as one wag has called them, "bribe local" campaigns--have had the same effect as the Obama administration's Cash For Clunkers program: A brief boom in sales, followed by a crash back to previous levels when the program ended.

Here in Ventura, we have come to realize that a buy local campaign that's truly effective is a sustained effort, not one based on gimmicks. This is hard to calibrate with retail thinking, since retailers are always focused, understandably, on the short term and often use gimmicks to boost sales. But all the evidence points to the idea that people will stop leaving town to buy things when two things happen: first, when the stuff they want to buy is available in their town; and second, when they realize that there's a relationship between where they buy stuff and how many police officers and firefighters their city can afford.

With the current retail market in flux, it's a little hard to know just exactly what stuff people are going to want to buy in the future (will they be buying cars or not). Therefore it is hard to know which retailers to go after. But the other half of it is easy: Rather than using short-term gimmicks, cities should use long-term public education efforts to ensure that their residents know where their sales tax dollars go--even when it means pointing to another city.

If you're interested in helping us with our buy local campaign, please contact Eric Wallner at ewallner@cityofventura.net.