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Cuts comparison
City Council/Mayor plan: Cut General Fund budget by 5% = $274,980
My plan: Cut property taxes by 10 percent = $236,500
Hmmmm . . .
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16 Responses to “Cuts comparison”
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Considering that the city has revenue in the form of property taxes, B&O, Gas Tax, Sales Tax, etc. the city will always be solvent unless it can’t pay it’s obligations. That means that their cash flow is not sufficent to cover obligations and there are no sources of funds internally or externally to pay the obligations. See Vallejo, CA http://www.ci.vallejo.ca.us/GovSite/default.asp?serviceID1=712&Frame=L1
Balancing the budget just means proposed or estimated revenue equals proposed or estimated expenses. Solvency is the ability to pay debts. One becomes insolvent when assets are less than liabilities. It can happen to a city because of litigation, failure of the economy and over extension of debt. Even Vallejo will survive after Chapter 9. Only a vote can eliminate a city. The RCWs do provide the process. That is something the citizens will have to decide.
Some people do not know that BY LAW the budget has to be balanced each year and it is. The City IS solvent! The real question should be “How can all of us do better?”
All I can say people is there are 5 city council seats coming open. Who is brave enough to step up & fill them. Actually attend meetings & make the hard decisions needed to make this city solvent again. At this pace it won’t happen during our lifetime!
Too many friends taking care of friends in the city jobs division. There should be mass layoffs, deep spending cuts, until this budget is balanced on revenues that were actually made in 2009.
These are unpopular decisions to make and those currently in office scream like chicken little & lock their doors so the voters can’t come in and ask for answers. Your power is your vote, so stand up and demand changes.
Good information here, and something to compare it with, thank you all!
Some others:
Union Gap 5850 Mayor $2000/Mo. No Administrator.
Stanwood 5705 Mayor $1200/Mo. No Administrator.
Woodland 5250 Mayor $1200/Mo. No Administrator.
Wapato 4605 Mayor $816/Mo. No Administrator.
We outsource or hire consultants for almost anything we do. We don’t do trash pick-up, other than the few city garbage cans around town. Water and Sewer are separate utilities. The roads are done and probably could be contracted out. We can’t stripe them. We can’t properly fix them. We don’t even do the weed control on the edges- contracted out currently. Video of Council meetings – currently contracted out. Jail- currently contracted out. Prior and current road LID Payment Management- currently contracted out.
Do those other cities have city managers? One argument for our mayor’s salary was that we would have no “city manager,” which brings up the question to me: what kind of staff does a city of 5000 have? The argument for a large staff here is that we have a large “infrastructure” of everything, I suppose.
It is very difficult to compare the pieces of a puzzle when the box with the big picture is missing. Where is that thing?
The Mayor’s salary of $500/month was passed and adopted the 14th day of January 2008 by Resolution No. 585 by the City of Ocean Shores WA.
Notice the anomaly for O.S. The presiding unelected mayor oversaw raising taxes $750,000 plus another 1% and the collection of $45 million for a $31.7 million road LID. There could be some cuts here. No city even comes close to the O.S mayor’s salary until the population gets into the hundreds of thousands.
Colville 5,040, $1000/month. Medical Lake 4,810, $700/month.
Ocean Shores, 4805 population, Mayor’s Compensation $8300/Month. $99,600 a year.
Omack 4750, $1200/month. North Bend, 4710 $1200/month.
When you call 911 your are declaring an emergency. Doing so means that you have chosen to have the EMS show up. The dye has been cast. You have decided to either pay the $275 dollar non-transport fee or transportation fee. There is no-one else making a decision for you regarding this obligation. How it is paid, insurance, medicare, medicaid or yourself is not at issue when services are rendered. The EMS personnel will tell you that. The billing happens after the fact. If you owe the city taxes or fees they can lien your house. If you owe the LID they lien you house. Debtors Prison does not exist in the United States. If we want this service to be available in the future it can not continue to impact the General Fund and other city obligations. The deficit must be solved. Cuts are fine, but charging for services also makes those services available.
Welcome to Wonderland where all of us wonder why every other town, city, county, and even the state are cutting expenses and people. Are we somehow insulated from the economy? Where is the secret stash of reserves? How do we keep losing on every dollar spent and making it up in volume of tourist? How do we keep paying people to fail to meet budget and do half their job at equal or greater salaries? Time to trim from the top of the tree rather than the bottom. Policy regarding revenue and the collection of it starts at the top.
Oui…
Good start. Now ask your self, do i really need this raise in pay? Do we really need 2 code enforcement officers? Maybe it’s time to make those exempt employes non exempt after all they are on salery. When their office is closed for a day to save money they still get paid. Not sure I see a big savings with that one. Peggy has been out of town most of her term and is in France for 3 weeks now. Is she getting paid for this time? Many $$$ here.
It’s a math thing, right? Perhaps the council should put some of our hard earned tax dollars into a basic math seminar. I’d bet we even have a resident math teacher who might volunteer…it’s simple airthmetic.
Uh, and we all know the difference between “budget” and “actual,” right?
That’s kind of like” let,s budget for a 15% increase then we can reduce it 5% and still be ahead 10%”. What a joke.
I could support the 5% budget cut PROVIDING the savings are applied to paying down our debt.
City Council/Mayor plan: Cut General Fund budget by 5% = $274,980 leaves them $5,224,620 to spend.
Your plan: Cut property taxes by 10 percent = $236,500 leaves them $5,263,100 to spend.
They get to spend $38,480 more with your plan. Your plan benefits property owners, taxpayers, citizens and voters at twice their benefit rate immediately next year.
Their plan only benefits employees.
So guess which cuts will our elected representatives choose? Then we can all ask ourselves why we tolerate this?