The city of Lompoc’s budget discussion has been going on for a couple of months, and there have been several presentations by the staff. I have been taking each of them at face value because the staff members are supposed to be professionals hired for their skill, so it seemed to be the way to go until I stepped back and made some comparisons of one presentation of budget numbers to another made a month later.
The city manager likes to point to the fact that he has four experienced municipal budget experts, including himself, on his staff. Well, if I had four experts on my staff and I was going to present data to the “board of directors”—in this case the City Council and the public—I would want to make sure I was providing accurate and consistent data each time the subject was discussed.
For the longest time I have been very critical of the faulty and mostly false budget data being tossed around like confetti by Councilmember Jim Mosby. One consistent complaint of his has been the variances in the information being received from the staff; could Mosby have been right? Well, even a broken analog watch is right twice a day.
And, if you’re going to throw rocks, as I have, sometimes you must adjust your aim.
After spending several hours comparing the revenue/expense information presented during the April 17 budget workshop with the same information presented during the May 28 workshop, I had to scratch my head and double check what I was seeing.
During the April 17 budget presentation, revenue was projected at $69.8 million for 2019-21. On May 28, just one month later, the revenue projection jumped to $74.6 million. That’s a whopping $4.8 million increase in one month! On the expense side: In April, it was $73.4 million, but it jumped to $76.2 million in May—another increase, this time of $2.8 million.
Now I was getting curious, so I checked the May 28 presentation for any errors; if the numbers were off between two different presentations, how did the staff do in just one document?
My curiosity was rewarded when I noted several errors that occurred because the back-up data in the 21-page document didn’t agree with the numbers on the summary page at the beginning of the same document. Of course, trying to do this exercise during the meeting—the first time the public had a chance to see the information—was impossible.
But council members had the information a couple of days prior to the meeting, yet other than generic complaints, none of them pointed these errors out during the debate. So, that left the public to wonder what all the fuss was about. After all, there were four expert budget people working for the city, so surely the information had been double-checked prior to presentation.
Hopefully, someday all this budget mess will get straightened out, but with both the staff and some council members continuously muddying the waters with faulty data, I can’t see how we will ever get there.
As for Mosby, he could be a credible critic if he would just stop spreading false information.
There is a serious problem in this city. Parks are in deplorable condition, recreation equipment is becoming unsafe for children to use and is simply removed because there are no funds to replace it. Fire and police vehicles are beyond their useful life and are becoming difficult to repair because parts are no longer being manufactured—and even if they were there are no funds available to fix them. Fire Station 1 has been judged to be unsafe and may collapse during an earthquake. Police/fire staffing is at a critical level, and many miles of our streets need to be rebuilt.
It’s past time to hit the pause button and address all the issues, provide reliable and consistent information, and then take responsible action to address the revenue and expense side of the budget.
By the time this is published yet another budget, supposedly the “final draft” will have been pitched to the City Council. The public’s patience is running out. “Get ’er done” and let us vote on a tax to fix the revenue side of the problem and make Lompoc great again.
Ron Fink writes his opinions about Lompoc from Lompoc. Send comments through the editor at clanham@santamariasun.com or write a response for publication and email it to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 20-27, 2019.