An Excellent Starting Point

Derek said...

USOC is a symptom of the problem. The real problem is that City Council and the government staff are disassociated from the community. They want to blame everything on TABOR because it prevents them from following an East Coast (or West Coast) model of just continually increasing city spending and bumping up taxes accordingly. Could expound on that a long time but will instead posit some solutions.

- First and foremost to correct the disassociation and improve communications, the entire and actual city budget should be published regularly on the springsgov website. The ENTIRE budget, not the amalgamated sections the city manager chooses to put up. Include salaries and benefits information for all employees of the city and city enterprises after privacy act review by the city attorney.

- All city enterprises will need to pay actual taxes instead of PILT due to 300. The city should immediately start figuring out what those taxes should be and how to implement them as PILT phases out over the next 8 years.

- Start planning immediately for the dissolution of the Stormwater Enterprise. I would place those duties and functions under CSU myself; I'm not sure why the city picked such a convoluted scheme as the fly-by-night enterprise.

- It's unfortunately too late to implement this retroactively to all the new development east of Powers but city planning should reject any new development that does not itself pay for the increased infrastructure burden on the city.

- Work with local civic groups to see how volunteer labor can assist in maintaining existing parks and recreation infrastucture until city finances improve. There are a lot of Boy Scouts needing community service hours and a lot of people who would donate time or funding to keep facilities like the Pioneers Museum or Rock Ledge Ranch open.

- Cease park and street "improvements" that aren't required.

- Return to CSU's focus on xeriscapy, especially in public lands. Why exactly are they planting trees and flowers that require water and maintenance along the streets (then claiming that as a "taxable benefit" in the springsgov website) anyway?

- Open one or two city pools this summer with increased user fees. Separated accounts might encourage additional donations as donors actually saw their donations were applied to operations and maintenance of the pools rather than general city coffers.

- Get rid of the city manager position or at least downscale the salary for it by 1/3-1/2. Scale all other city administrative position salaries accordingly (i.e., flatten the salary profile of the administration). This would translate to a roughly 10% cut for the Fire and Police Chiefs but help hold the line for "sworn" workers.

- Get rid of the EDC. Rely instead on a voluntary forum of local business or community organizations with at least 1000 employees/members to advise the Council on what measures would improve economic development.