The Lompoc City Council had another discussion about what to do about the next two-year budget. To put it in plain language, they have a serious problem that is only going to get worse.
City Manager Jim Throop, who has 30 years of budgeting experience, opened the meeting saying, “This is a very big budget crisis we’re in,” and, “we have to make some tough decisions.” This proved to be an understatement.
According to the city budget guru, if they don’t start paying down the “interest” portion of the Public Employee Retirement System debt, the city will eventually have to stop providing all city services within the next couple of budget cycles.
The PERS debt is like your own credit card; it consists of the principal and interest. And, just like your credit card, if the city continues paying only on the principal in order to provide day-to-day services, then the interest keeps growing.
Keep in mind that the PERS debt must be paid first, so having enough revenue to cover both PERS and day-to-day services is critical.
But three members of the City Council can’t seem to grasp the urgency of the matter, no matter how many times they are told that the city will “go out of business” if they don’t come up with more revenue.
Councilmen Jim Mosby and Dirk Starbuck think that cutting expenses is the answer; that’s short-term thinking in the extreme. By failing to acknowledge the impact of the PERS interest debt liability, these two “budget wizards” and their clueless follower Victor Vega are dooming our city to becoming another Detroit.
Their approach to discussing the budget is to badger and belittle the efforts of the city staff. Starbuck wants to cut senior staff pay, a move that will certainly send folks to the nearest exit.
His assessment concerning senior staff pay was that, “See here again we’ve not gone to where the highest amount of fat is in this budget.” The finance guru had to explain that the all senior management positions derive their pay from both the enterprise fund and general fund, so it would take some effort to figure out how much would be saved if the general fund portion of their pay was reduced.
And, the city attorney reminded them that all pay is bound by contracts between the city and both represented (union) and unrepresented (senior staff) employees and that these agreements would have to be renegotiated.
Of course, these inept council members haven’t suggested cutting their own stipends or benefits to help with the crisis, but I guess they feel they are more valuable than the professionals that have been hired to run city government.
When the city manager informed the council that they had inadvertently added a million dollars to the budget to deal with the homeless issue in the riverbed, the police chief said that several new camps were discovered in the area. He also said that this type of police work would cease if proposed cuts are implemented.
In response, Starbuck suggested establishing a “shooting range” in the riverbed to solve the problem. This was a totally inappropriate statement uttered during a public meeting, even if he only made it in jest.
As for Mosby, he was recommending the elimination of the code enforcement staff and public information officer, along with asking firefighters for concessions, eliminating the fire marshal slot and trimming planning staff to save thousands of dollars. As usual his facts may not stand up to scrutiny, and the city manager asked for a copy of his “facts” so that they could be reviewed.
Both Mosby and Starbuck had to be corrected several times as they spewed faulty “facts” to support their arguments. These types of error-ridden utterances are not helpful to a productive discussion, but that doesn’t seem to matter to either of them.
It should be noted that Mosby has had many encounters with both the city and county code enforcement people because of the way he maintains and operates his commercial and private properties. By eliminating both the fire marshal and code enforcement officers, his life would be a lot easier.
As for Councilman Vega, he only seemed to become interested in the discussion at the end of the four-hour meeting. Either he didn’t understand what was being said by the staff, or he just didn’t have anything to add.
Finally, the adult in the room, Mayor Jenelle Osborne, summed it up this way, “We’re trying to nickel and dime ourselves out of a debt that is actually twice the size it was last time.”
As with previous discussions of the budget, several members of the public simply asked that they be allowed to vote on the matter; the logical solution seemed to be to assess a temporary 1 percent sales tax to pay down the PERS interest.
But predictably, like every other meeting, the council majority ignored these inputs and simply refused to let the people who will be affected most by the reduced or lost services have a voice in the matter.
I don’t know what Councilmembers Mosby, Starbuck, and Vega’s end game is; at this point it seems that they are intent on dissolving the city of Lompoc and turning it into a community services district that only provides utility services.
Ron Fink writes commentaries from Lompoc. Send your response to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 25 – May 2, 2019.