Budget projections. For Colorado Springs in 2010, it looks pretty bleak.
Just check out the city’s Web page. You can’t avoid the numbers or the city’s efforts to convince voters to approve a property tax increase on Nov. 3 to avoid drastic cuts. Here’s an example of the city’s efforts to educate voters on how little they pay in sales tax compared to other cities.
Income from sales taxes and other sources is in a free-fall. The city planned to spend about $237 million from its general fund in 2010. Now, it is projecting a $25.4 million shortfall in revenue.
Here’s a link to a presentation by City Manager Penny Culbreth-Graft , left, on Aug. 24 in which she laid out the ugly numbers.
Everyone knows the greatest savings are achieved through reductions in personnel. And you are probably thinking: look, the city has 1,800 employees. How hard can it be to save $25.4 million?
Really hard if you take 1,200 employees out of the equation.
That’s how many police and firefighters are on the city payroll. Voters don’t like cuts in public safety. And politicians like to brag about all the new cops and firefighters they put on the streets.
That leaves just 600 city staffers to shoulder the cuts. And, again, nobody likes to see their pothole fillers and snowplow drivers cut. Here’s a look at the budget pie. The big slice is police and fire. The smaller slice is every other department in city government.
So the budget ax is taking aim at so-called “non-essential” services like parks, recreation and cultural services. I guess that’s true, if you consider quality of life a “non-essential” item. Check out these numbers.
That agency has 216 folks work to maintain six community centers, seven pool complexes, the ice center, museum, historic sites and thousands of acres of parks from Garden of the Gods and Red Rock Canyon down to dozens of neighborhood parks.
Who needs them? I’m guessing there isn’t anyone reading this who doesn’t use one or more of the facilities on that list.
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I did in fact look at the city’s web page. The most disturbing thing I saw was just how thickly the city is laying on their argument. The anti-TABOR attitude is evident all through the website — especially the ill-disguised agit-prop masquerading as “education” on TABOR. That background makes it difficult to accept the rest of the data presented as objective analysis. In fact, the efforts to convince voters to accept the city council’s desire to increase taxes are so ham-handed (try their “survey” of how much you “use” city services daily) that it actually makes me more reluctant to accept their conclusion.
The other main objection I have is that the city has consistently presented a scare campaign with the only solution being to raise taxes despite an ongoing recession. This message might be taken more seriously if the city council didn’t have the history of sneaking in the stormwater “fees”. If I were to get a 12% salary reduction I would have no recourse to tell my employer he had to raise my rate.
Why exactly does the city have a city manager on top of a mayor and vice-mayor anyway? Are the mayoral and vice-mayoral workloads really so great that we need a third (unelected) leader/manager? Why do we have so many seemingly empty buses running so often? The Julie Penrose Fountain is pretty but would be nearly as scenic as static sculpture without the fountain aspect while we are weathering the storm.
Denver and Aurora are hardly the models of constitutionality and efficiency I’d advocate following anyway. The real question to ask about the city’s sales tax comparison chart is why we have a higher rate than Centennial.