Why does it always feel surprising when budgets dry up? We go a year or two without having to think too hard about money on the municipal level, and then, bam! Your city’s gotta start pinching those pennies again.
Santa Maria’s currently moving forward with a solution for its $21.3 million budget deficit. Sort of.
The city’s finance director, Xenia Bradford, told the City Council on June 18 that it’s got a “systematic problem with the budget deficit within the general fund,” including public safety tax Measure U. “They are not meeting their expenditures. We went from $80 million in allocations to proposed $139.8 million. Positions have grown over the years, 2024-25 incorporates 680 full-time positions and no change for 2025-26.”
That means even without adding any new full-time jobs, it’s going to cost nearly $60 million more to keep paying salaries and insurance for city employees.
The good news: The City Council doesn’t want to make the citizens pay, at least not through taxes.
The other news: Someone’s got to pay.
“Raising taxes, that shouldn’t be our first option. I think our community is struggling so much, and I’ve seen other governments—local, state, federal—[when] there’s trouble they like to raise taxes,” said Councilmember Carlos Escobedo, who was one of the dissenting votes on the budget, which passed 3-2. “We need to look inwards and game plan before even touching the reserve for something like this.”
On paper, the city has to show the state that its biennial budget is balanced and that it can cover costs. To do that, interim City Manager Alex Posada told the City Council that they do indeed have to dip into their reserves, or at least show that they have said reserves to use.
Everything’s OK, Sacramento. We’re not asking for money! We can make it another two years and finally finish college, Dad!
Nothing new to see here. “We’ve been down this road before where we’ve had to make some hard decisions,” Posada said after urging city departments to “pull together as much reductions as we can.”
Yet all the while, the Firefighters Union Local 2020 has been asking the city for better wages to be in line with the market average. It seems like in the face of tightening belts across city departments, at least Councilmember Gloria Soto, who was the other dissenting vote on the budget, is hearing the firefighters. She asked city staff to find a way to delay capital projects—things like sports complexes and fire stations—so the city could improve salaries.
“The last thing we should do … is tackle it through a scarcity mindset, and [we should] think about some of the ways we can generate revenue for the city so we can compensate employees and ensure that we put our money where our mouth is,” Soto said. “Your budget is your moral compass; it shows an organization’s priorities, and I’d like to show that our priority lies in our employees.”
I sure hope Santa Maria can put its money where it belongs, and not just on paper—because when it doesn’t pay people like first responders what they need, we all pay.
The Canary puts its birdseed where its mouth is. Send millet to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 7, 2024.