Serious consequences for public safety
By Joann Marmolejo, President
In June, Santa Maria City Manager Tim Ness reviewed for the City Council a 22-page report — amendments to the adopted 2011-12 city budget — with serious consequences for public safety.
Some interesting points in the report were:
The need for additional police, fire and other personnel cuts, resulting in the city’s employee-to-population ratio dropping to 4.55 — with 8.50 being the average of other comparable central coast agencies.
In 2009, the city received $4.3 million in American Reinvestment and Recovery Act federal stimulus funding to build two additional fire stations in the northern portion of the city.
In July 2012, Fire Station No. 5 will be completed, and with its completion comes the need to hire the necessary firefighters to staff this new station. However, identifying the $1.6 million in operational cost needed to staff a new station will be problematic given the city’s current financial condition.
Should no new General Fund revenue source be identified and secured between now and July 2012, the city will have no other choice but to implement a modified brownout deployment in order to staff Station No. 5. In a brownout scenario, when there is a vacancy, personnel are moved from station to station, leaving one engine without personnel to operate it.
A possible way to alleviate this scenario is to have the City Council authorize the placement of a revenue enhancement measure on the June or November 2012 election ballot. Meanwhile, secure the services of an outside consultant at a cost of $45,000, to perform the necessary polling and surveying of the residents to determine whether a revenue enhancement ballot measure would be successful.
This revenue enhancement could be in the form of a sales tax over-ride, a parcel tax assessment, a utility users tax, just to name a few.
In November 2010, Santa Barbara County voters turned down Measure S, which would have dedicated half of the annual tax revenue — estimated at $30 million — to constructing and operating a new 304-bed jail in Santa Maria. Measure S would sunset in 14 years.
A new North County jail had been projected to cost $80 million. However, Sheriff Bill Brown and the county had been conditionally approved for a $56.3 million grant from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to construct the new jail.
Of the estimated $30 million annual revenue this half-percent sales tax increase would have generated, half would be used for constructing and operating the new jail. The other half would be used for programs to reduce the number of repeat offenders, fire district budgets, more law enforcement allocated to the cities on a per capita basis.
Santa Maria, being the most populated city in the county, would get the biggest amount of the money allocated to the cities. Yet, many, including some public officials, spoke against its passage.
If Measure S had passed, just think of all the jobs it would have created during the jail construction, and later for staffing, how the money spent here would have helped our economy, would have helped fund staffing for Fire Station No 5.
And the expense for public safety would have been borne by the entire county, instead of just residents of Santa Maria, should a city revenue enhancement measure be on our 2012 ballot and passed.
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Date:
9 Sep 2011 - 12:00am