Community Shares Budget Ideas

Council Hears From Residents

In a continuing series of City Council meetings at neighborhood venues, the Monday night meeting was held at Linwood Howe Elementary School in order to engage community members and the Council in a dialogue on the budget.

Chief Financial Officer Jeff Muir presented a PowerPoint summary of the 2012-2013 budget, showing that expenses are exceeding incoming revenue and cuts to services and staff look inevitable unless there can be some new source of revenue in the form of a tax increase.

Proposed reductions include fewer police (with a possible increase in crime and slower response time); cutbacks in fire service (again leading to slower response time); cuts to Parks and Recreation that could lead to the closing of park restrooms on Sundays and the cancellation of the popular Fiesta La Ballona; cuts to Public Works that would result in less money and personnel to do street repairs; cuts to Community Development that would result in smaller staff and longer waits for obtaining permits; and cuts to Administration that would impact the city’s ability to respond to the public.

Muir noted that any revenue from possible tax increases would go toward maintaining the same level of services that Culver City currently enjoys. But “any tax increase must be approved by the voters,” he said.

Rather than a property tax, which would only tax those who own homes or businesses, a sales tax would be paid by many people who don’t live in Culver City but who come here to buy products or take in entertainment. Such a tax would generate about eight million a year.

“It would not help the deficit but it would preserve current operations,” said Muir.

Speakers responded with ideas that emphasized thinking in smaller terms to bring in revenue in small but significant ways.

One speaker suggested in-car computers for writing and printing traffic tickets; increasing fees for usage of public parks by private schools that use the parks for physical education classes; and having citizens maintain sidewalks and trees outside their homes.

Another speaker’s list of suggestions included making the Fiesta La Ballona self-sustaining via private sponsorships; having people sweep the streets themselves instead of using city staff and machinery to clean the streets; tightening city efficiency by not duplicating mailings or scheduling conflicting services and events; relying more on volunteers to perform certain functions; and taking up less of the City Manager’s time by eliminating the invocations presented at the beginning of each Council meeting by the City Manager.

In answer to a speaker’s observation that the Redevelopment Agency never was meant to fund services and events but was supposed to promote the building of low-cost housing and decrease urban blight, Mayor Andrew Weissman admitted: “We ‘made our own bed’ with utilization of RDA money that we incorporated into the General Fund.

” The practice of taking funds from the RDA went back a long way, he said, and proved in the end to be a bad idea. But he added “I think that Redevelopment did enable the community to enjoy a higher level of service than would have been available if we had not had the General Fund. Now we have a community that has come to value that level of service. [That] community is prepared to support a tax increase to prevent the horrors in [the budget] report.”

Jim Clarke wondered if the proposed local sales tax increase could be raised from half a cent to three fourths of a cent in order to raise more than the amount needed to simply maintain services. The higher amount might present a risk of losing voters but he thought it would be worth the risk.

When the Council was reminded of the recent survey showing that most voters approved a half cent tax but gave less support for a three-fourth cent tax, Jeff Cooper observed that, had the survey questions been reversed, with the higher tax amount mentioned first, voters might have easily agreed even to the higher amount proposed.

Meghan Sahli-Wells approved of the idea of volunteerism as a resource in saving the city money on staff.

There will be one more budget presentation and dialogue at the July 16 meeting before the Council decides on action to put a sales tax increase on the November election ballot.

In other actions, a speaker in Public Comment had complaints about noise from the new Expo Line.

Linda Firth, who lives in the eastern end of Culver City, told the Council that she is only getting about four hours of sleep because of the constant noise from the trains.

She said she had complained to the MTA and received the response that “your city wanted this.” She declared that the MTA had “lied” to the public about the noise level and the efficiency of the “sound walls” that were supposed to block out the sounds of the trains.

O’Leary, who serves on the Expo Line Board, told Firth: “We [the Board] need to hear this from you.” He admitted to also having concerns about train noise and wanted to monitor the city’s scheduled sound tests as well as visit Firth’s home to hear for himself.

City Engineer Charles Herbertson said that mitigations for Expo Line sound problems are in process and that if it is found that noise exceeds the standards set in the EIR, steps will be taken to correct the problem.

 

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