A View From Harbor Street
By David Buckingham
OK, to be fair, in some respects, that column title is a bit of a “bait and switch and here’s why — before getting on to the City’s Fiscal Year 2016-2017 (FY16/17) budget, which is funded in large part by a fraction of the taxes we pay, we’ll take just a minute to review where our taxes go, or don’t go.
Here’s a quick review of some basic tax facts: Federal income tax — our annual April 15 taxes — pays for giant federal programs like Social Security, Medicare, the military, and all the various federal programs and departments. None of the federal income taxes comes back to our city.
Our California income taxes go to Sacramento and make it partway back by funding things like Caltrans (but none of that is spent on local streets) and Department of Corrections. None of our state income taxes comes back to serve us in the City budget.
With property taxes, over 90-percent goes to the County for things like education and social services. Less than 10% comes back to the City. Sales taxes are similar, with over 80% of the sales taxes generated in Morro Bay going to Sacramento to support State programs. A little less than 20% generated in Morro Bay ends up in our general fund to pay for things like streets, cops and firefighters. Here’s an overview of the city’s budget for the year ahead.
The City Council is scheduled to adopt the FY 2016/17 budget on June 14. The City staff has been working on the budget for several months and the Council and engaged residents, have been looking at it for a few weeks.
The budget is based on the City’s 88 goals and objectives for the upcoming year, adopted by the Council with tons of great public input back in February. So, this budget works to complete the tasks our residents set for the year. Here are a few highlights:
• Labor. Over 70% of the budget goes to pay our great employees. From police officers to firemen to the guys the filling potholes and cleaning our public bathrooms, most of our roughly $13 million budget goes for labor. And, to be clear, those folks do a great job for us.
Looking ahead, with minimum wage almost doubling over the next six years, we are going to have some challenges keeping the budget balanced, as the law requires, with increased spending on labor.
• Streets. Spending on streets, while still woefully inadequate, has been increased 13% over last year for street reconstruction, rehabilitation and repair. The budget also allocates enough funds to put over 25,000 pounds of asphalt every month into potholes.
• Where does the money go? Here’s the big picture: our three biggest departments, in order, are police, fire and public works. If you include spending on streets, those departments represent over two thirds of the total budget.
The next biggest are community development (planning, building, etc.) and recreation. Next, and representing a pretty small portion overall, are administration, finance and IT.
So, our budget reflects our priorities — high on police, fire and streets; medium on development and recreation; and pretty small on the administrative things it requires to run any organization. Would we like to so more? Sure, but we have a problem.
• The Gap. The revenues-to-requirements gap remains harshly obvious. That is, there is more we need to do than we have money to do it. As noted above, our streets spending remains inadequate. We need about three times more money to fix our streets than we have.
If we got rid of half of the Police or Fire Department that would solve the problem, but, we also want to have adequate police and fire services. So the gap will continue to exist, along with bad streets, until we begin to revitalize our city and encourage appropriate economic development.
Here are a few more things the draft budget does: funds a triple increase in public bathroom cleaning over last year; increases trimming of trees by 50%; allows us to continue to broadcast our public meetings on TV and record them to the Internet; and increases spending on streets from $520,000 to almost $590,000.
There is much more, but no more space in this column. I encourage you to review the budget letter, available under “Hot Topics” on the City website (www.morro-bay.ca.us). It’s easy to read and understand. If you have questions or concerns, I would love to hear from you. Send an email to: [email protected]. And if you want to engage even further, attend the June 14 City Council meeting at which the Council is scheduled to approve the FY16/17 budget.
David Buckingham is the city manager of Morro Bay. His “A View From Harbor Street” column is a regular feature of The Bay News. Send Letters to the Editor to: [email protected].
