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Lid Lift II
First, a Citizens Advisory Panel presentation on EMS, which recommended a levy of 35 cents per thousand. Then, council voted, 6-0, for finance director Art Wuerth to bring back a resolution for a 35 cents per thousand property tax increase, earmarked for EMS. Likely at the next council meeting, this resolution will be presented and voted on; if it passes, it will go to voters in April.
Lid Lift Lite? (“30 percent cheaper than the original Lid Lift . . .”)
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on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 10:46 am and is filed under North Coast News.
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Sure hope folks actually read Resolution 474.
There was nothing temporary about the .10 additional for a new ‘firefighter’. The levy was for .35 period. It simply was worded to insure that the voters understood that the .25 cent portion was a renewal of an existing levy (road levy had just failed) and the .10 was an added amount. The levy was for .35 for 6 years. For 2010 the levy amount is zero. Hope we are not in for continued distortion to make a point.
Thank you Mark, that was very helpful and well described.
To clarify one point, it is not the same .35 they had 6 years ago. When they passed that levy 6 years ago, it was resolution 474 that was written where .10 of it would be awarded temporarily to hire a new firefighter and .25 would be used as an EMS levy.
Because a levy is monetarily dependent and not percentage dependent, the actual levy was only .19 per thousand of valuation when it expired in 2009, because of the increased property values set by the appraiser in 2007. So if you were to be replacing the existing levy, it would be actually .136 cents, if you took away the temporary fire fighter allocation that was originally awarded. Therefore, the proposed levy is actually a 250% increase from what was authorized in 2003.
Get ready for the city to one more time, start a landslide of false rhetoric to try to shove this new levy down the taxpayer’s throat.
Strange how the citizen committee came to many of the same conclusions the oppositon did to the original levy. Now they are working on collections, tightening the budgets of all the departments. They should outsource billing and collections. We have one person doing the job. I would bet a billing and collections service would have more than one person doing the job. Therefore, we would get billing out quicker, collections followed up more often and have a better result at a lower cost. Seems like a slam dunk to me. Also, they came back saying that they need more data as to what is happening there.
At .35 cents this is the same as the expired 6 year levy that was to be replaced by the Lid Lift I. If I understand the limit of 1% for a typical renewal of an EMS levy this request is not a “Lift”. So would this not just require a simple majority of 50 percent plus 1 vote? it would require a 60 percent majority for passage.