By MY WRITE BY BILL BAUER
The City Council on Tuesday night will review the 2005/2006 budget and hear from the public about spending $2.5 million of a budget surplus and requests for the next fiscal year.
The total budget surplus is closer to $5.5 million as a result of improved tourism and sales and hotel bed tax income. Additional vehicle registration fees from the state, and increased property and utility tax contributions are adding to the surplus.
Roughly $3 million already is committed to cover the increased cost of city employee salaries. About $1.8 million will go to salary increases due to changes in position for employees of Community and Cultural Services and Human Services, according to an article in the SMDP. In other words, extra money for employees to oversee, administrate and supervise homeless services and homeless service providers. Knowing this City Council, it will try to find a way to give even more money to transients.
Some individuals and organizations already have put in their requests. The 18th Street Arts Center has requested funding increases, as has the Pico Youth and Family Center.
Kids who use “The Cove,” the new skate facility in Memorial Park, want lighting for evening skating. They say that during winter months, there’s only an hour or two of daylight after school, which cuts into skate and boarding time. And, they want lower user fees. Both of these make sense. After all, doesn’t this serve all of our youth?
I have some ideas. How about reinstating some recently curtailed city services? One of my neighbors suggested tree trimming. City Hall reduced the frequency of tree trimming in recent years when money was tight. The city said that nobody would notice. But we do notice.
Surely, City Hall can find enough bucks to keep our branch libraries open Fridays or Sundays, preferably both.
Potholes are prolific, and the streets department needs to have the money to take care of these problems more quickly. And how about replacing downed “no parking” signs?
The Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City suggests updating the way City Hall evaluates traffic impacts from proposed developments. They say, “The current method... has been shown to be outdated and very flawed. New (building) projects are going forward based on an unrealistic assessment of the amount of new traffic a project will generate.”
Current traffic studies, they say, often use antiquated data and isolated street intersections resulting in inaccurate traffic planning. The coalition estimates it will only cost about $200,000 to update the methodology. Best of all, they’ve already asked the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Irvine to submit a proposal. Way to go. It’s a shame that a citizen’s group is asking for this and not City Hall’s transportation management department.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind seeing the money go to rolling back the recent increases in garbage, sewage and water rates that were substantially raised last year.
Then, there’s housing. Must we continue to build more and bigger “affordable” housing projects that primarily benefit non Santa Monicans and foreign nationals? There’s even more of a downside to this. More families mean more traffic. Low-income families use more city services, increasing the cost of government.
In the meantime, how about protecting existing low-and middle-income housing from profiteering by landlords, speculators and developers? How about down-zoning some of the mid-city, multi-family neighborhoods to make it uneconomical to build?
The problem is that changing the zoning codes doesn’t require spending money on programs of dubious value or handing out cash for pet pork. (Bill Bauer is a longtime Santa Monica resident and a freelance writer.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 13, 2006. Read the original PDF.