Balancing Costs against Revenue

By Stephen Murray

I believe we can erase our current budget deficit without raising taxes or fees.

We need to use best practices and comparative benchmarks from other California cities to increase City departmental efficiency and reduce expenditures. Our Fire Department and Street Departments are spending less per person than other California Cities . Our Police Department and our Parks are spending more. There may be some great reasons why this is happening, but we need to audit under-performing areas to ensure that we are receiving the quality of service that we are paying for.

36% of our City's expenditures are in operations and maintenance fees. Performing cost-cutting measures that fuel sustainability and reduce our resource use could initially save us hundreds of thousand of dollars here and needs to be addressed by the Sustainability Committee.

~Payroll and Retiree issues

42% of our budget, or $92.5 Million, are in Salaries and benefits. Culver City still has employees from the dissolved redevelopment agency still on staff as they are continuing to provide valuable services. This is an added drain on our already poor financial position.

Unless new revenue sources can be found we will need to reduce staff and associated services. In the business world this is called restructuring and it involves prioritizing positions and services that add the greatest usable value to the City. In lieu of significant staff reduction we need to look at how our money is being spent and create policies to reduce expenditures but still be an attractive employer:

-Equitably limit how overtime is used to calculate retirement pensions across all tiers to a fixed % of base salary.
-Require City employees to contribute more to their Public Employee Retirement plan + but no higher than what like-employed State positions contribute.
-Cap maximum salaries to not exceed 80th percentile of combined local private and governmental salaries for like positions.
-Consider contractors to work in eligible positions that aren't part of City's core institutional services or knowledge ( ie parking enforcement, graphic services etc.)

~Taxes

The City needs to develop a turnaround plan and a balanced budget before going to the voters for Tax increases.

Future tax increase legislation should have all or part of the revenue stream earmarked to specific programs or expenditure categories- and not be for "General Fund relief." The council should seek to link revenue sources to associated services. The exception is public safety expenditures which can pull from any revenue stream.

3/4% of our TOT tax should fund our existing Art and other programs that enrich the cultural value of the city and drive visitors here.

Tax increases should have sunset dates or otherwise but up for periodic renewal by voters.

Once the City's budget is balanced, The City Council will need to open community discussions about finding equitable means to guarantee stable funding for our parks and critical safety services of Emergency Medical, Fire and Police.