Just do it, but do it my way!

I appreciate citizens who take an interest in local government. I know the vast majority of citizens don't. Still, it is hard not to sigh when I see the Council get messages like this one they received today:

"Please do not cut a single cent from the arts! We’re supposed to develop the arts!"

I don't mean to pick on this particular person or this particular opinion. It is precisely because that kind of sentiment is so widespread that I cite it:

Don't raise my taxes! Don't cut a penny from my favorite cause or program! Don't charge any more stupid fees!

These sentiments are not confined to citizens. We also have some employees who insist that it's the public who should bear all the costs of the economic downturn and just leave my job, pay and benefits alone!

It's a free country. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. But you have to wonder: how exactly does the Council satisfy all these voices clamoring for having it their way?

Cutting costs, minimizing lay-offs

On Monday night, the City Council adopted the first two-thirds of the Redesign Plan for living within our means.

They approved reductions of $7.2 million in our General Fund, although they voted for temporary funding to retain Medic Engine 10 in our Fire Department and four police officer positions pending the outcome of our application for stimulus funding from the Federal government. The Council will resume discussions on the rest of the Redesign Plan this coming Monday night.

The Redesign Plan is an $85 million spending blueprint for the next two years. It shrinks our workforce by nearly 10%. The goal is a "leaner and greener organization" that focuses on achieving the results that matter most. That means top priority to public safety, then economic revitalization. It identifies $11.4 million in overall savings.

The entire workforce is cooperating on a plan to reduce payroll expenses by 5%. Several unions have already ratified extensions to their contracts that provide 15 months of lower compensation. The rest are currently completing that process. That saves money that preserves services -- and the jobs of those providing those services.

But given the steep fall in revenue due to the economic crisis, 46 positions are recommended for elimination. Of these, 26 are currently filled. Many of those are in the area of construction permit approvals and inspections. With major development projects at a near standstill, we will have to let go seasoned professionals who were handling a huge workload not long ago, during the boom times.

While the City Council has clearly indicated that we must make "tough choices," everyone is concerned about the fate of the dedicated staff who would lose their jobs at the worst time in memory for finding a new one.

So while the emphasis has been on putting the needs of the community first, we've also been working to minimize the number of lay-offs. We’ve held open a number of generalist positions that might facilitate transfers and retraining opportunities. We’ve offered three alternatives for early retirement/separation options. Two are complete, one remains underway. Since the plan was presented earlier this month, we’ve reviewed a number of alternative suggestions for achieving similar savings without eliminating positions. We are pursuing grant funding, including the Federal stimulus package.

As a result, we are reasonably confident that once the Council has completed its consideration of the Redesign Plan, we will have to move forward with less than a dozen lay-offs.

That’s a win-win. For individual staff members, for the good of the organization and, most of all, for the service we provide to our community.

Medic Engine 10

Twenty years ago, Ventura had the same number of firefighters and the same number of firefighters it has today.

What's changed?

The city borders have expanded, with new homes, businesses and neighborhoods created. The population has increased by 15% and 911 calls have soared. There are fewer fires and a lot more medical emergency calls. Twenty years ago, when the city advertised firefighter openings, the line of recruits wound around the block to take the test. Now we have a difficult time finding people qualified to meet the entry level requirements, including paramedic licensing. There is also a much improved system of mutual aid to ensure every community is backed up in the case of major fires or disasters. But mutual aid from another jurisdiction doesn't help in the critical first five minutes of response time for a house fire or a heart attack.

Two years ago, after years of studies and debates, the City Council allocated just under half a million dollars in annual funding to improve our mediocre response times, especially to the underserved parts of the city south of the 101 Freeway. The Fire Department came up with a unique innovation: Medic Engine 10.

What's so special about it? It is a three person unit that is available to respond at our peak hours of demand. The assigned crew doesn't sleep in a station -- in fact Medic Engine 10 is not tied to a station but is assigned wherever it is most likely to be needed in the course of each 10 hour shift.

Since it was initiated, we've averaged a 10% improvement in response times to priority one calls.

Now we face the local impacts of the global economic crisis. Sales tax, permit fees and other revenues have plunged, leaving a $12 million gap to continue to provide city services. Our "Budgeting for Outcomes" effort worked on a plan to safeguard our highest priority services and to make "tough choices" about lesser priorities.

Public safety is number one with the City Council -- and in the last three years, it's share of the budget has increased from 50% to 54%. But if public safety is immune from any cuts at all, the rest of the operational budget has be chopped almost 30%. So every department has been asked to fund what matters most and find ways to reduce expenses.

The entire staff is being asked to take a 5% pay reduction and the fire union has already ratified an agreement to actually go beyond that.

So, if you keep all six of our fire stations open, what's left to trim?

Medic Engine 10. By parking it, we could shift the three man crew to the three current vacancies we have in our other crews, saving overtime and helping balance the overall budget.

Understandably, that has generated debate.

It's a healthy debate -- and a vigorous one. Last night, after hearing from more than 20 public speakers on budget issues, the City Council adopted the first $7.2 million in spending reductions in our Redesign Plan. Medic Engine 10's hours were cut by half, but it will remain on the job until the end of the year.

The vote was 5-2 and reflected the "tough choices" the Council and the community must make. We've done our best to meet a wide range of community needs and desires within available revenue -- but that revenue has been sharply reduced. There are reasons to hope that new revenue will be forthcoming -- and a case to be made that the economy may actually get worse. No one knows.

In the meantime, Medic Engine 10 will continue to shave response time when it's deployed. A symbol of the challenging times we find ourselves in when "tough choices" are inescapable.

Sales tax: the solution?

Since the passage of Proposition 13 thirty years ago, most California cities have relentlessly pursued sales tax generators to pay for local public service. Whether by direct subsidies or "cashbox zoning," cities have measured their success by how well they compete with neighboring cities to keep consumer spending at home -- and lure customers from beyond their borders.

At home, Ventura is relentlessly criticized by a vocal group who decry our "anti-business" or "anti-development" attitude. If only we were aggressive like other cities (they usually cite Oxnard), we wouldn't have any budget problems (or at least they would be much less severe.)

What is absent from this discussion are facts. The latest sales tax figures have been released by the State of California.

• Thousand Oaks (median household income of $89,953) pulled in $150 per resident in the first three quarters of this fiscal year.
• Camarillo (median household income $72,762) collected $147 during the same period -- and so did Ventura (median household income $63,925)

In other words, although Thousand Oaks had a median income 41% higher, it's sales were only 3% above Ventura. And although Camarillo has a median income nearly 14% higher, Ventura had the identical per capita sales tax revenue.

The contrast is even sharper with Oxnard (median household income of $53,298) which only collected $90 per resident. So although Ventura's median income is only 20% higher, our sales tax performance was 63% better than Oxnard's.

To be fair, Camarillo's new outlet mall expansion has recently boosted their revenue and Oxnard's Riverpark Collection, currently under construction, will certainly improve their numbers next year. But it is simply a figment of the imagination that Ventura has lagged in generating sales tax revenue. If any major Ventura City has fared poorly, it would be Simi Valley, where despite household income of $88,406, its per capita tax is only slightly above Oxnard at $93.

Of course, these numbers don't take into account all sorts of quality of life and land use planning decisions made over decades in each community. A city can no more be measured solely on its current sales tax performance than it can on size of population or acreage of parks. But in the debate about Ventura's future, let's be realistic about our sales tax performance. We are already doing very, very well compared to other cities.

Redesigning Ventura City Government

Tonight, we present our Redesign Plan formally to the City Council for their consideration.

The goal of this plan is an ambitious one: to forge a sustainable strategy so we can weather at least two more years of hardship from the local effects of the global economic crisis. We will not spend money we don’t have. With our limited resources, we must reshape City government to focus on what matters most. The highest priority has gone to public safety and rebuilding prosperity by promoting high-wage, high value jobs in the private sector. Every aspect of the way we do business has been questioned with the goal of eliminating or reducing lower-priority expenses and finding quicker, better and/or cheaper ways to deliver high-priority results. We offer a plan for a leaner and greener city organization redesigned to succeed despite these difficult times.

This plan is the result of a unique collaborative effort. Every city program in the General Fund was analyzed and prioritized by six committees made up of key staff from throughout the organization and active community partners. The final recommendation has been put together in a spirit of shared sacrifice, City staff has been asked to reduce payroll expenses by 5%. The Redesign plan reduces our General Fund workforce by 10%, requiring reductions in services that will be felt by every citizen of Ventura for years to come.

It is always easier to get people to agree that something must be done than to get them to agree on what must be done. Many aspects of the Redesign Plan will be controversial because they eliminate or reduce programs popular with many parts of our community and reduce our loyal and dedicated city workforce. Even those who worked hard on this effort vigorously debated every element of the overall plan. But the Redesign plan fulfills the Council’s key groundrule for this effort, unanimously adopted in January:

“To ensure increasingly limited resources are allocated to what matters most in achieving the General Plan Strategic Visions, the City Council recognizes that tough choices will need to be made and that its emphasis will be placed on eliminating, reducing or restructuring lower-priority programs and expenses rather than compromising the success of high-priority efforts by inadequate funding.”

The Redesign plan is organized into six themes, reflecting the strategic visions of the 2005 General Plan, which also guide our annual performance measures. The underlying budget framework for each department makes up the total spending plan for approximately $85 million in General Fund revenue during the next fiscal year.
The Redesign plan will be presented formally at the City Council meeting tonight for discussion and debate beginning on March 23rd. The purpose is to begin to implement the approved version of the plan prior to the new fiscal year.

It is with a deep sense of responsibility that I recognize how difficult the upcoming decisions will be for our City Council and our community. Yet back in 2000, the citizens who contributed to the “Ventura Vision” report recognized, “to remain successful, Ventura must periodically renew itself, re-examine its goals and create a shared vision to guide the community into the future.” When the City Council unanimously adopted the General Plan in 2005, it embraced a long-term vision of what it would take to “ensure that our City continues to be a great place to live.” This crisis forces a re-examination of how we achieve our goals through a redesign of how our government does business and a reprioritization of what matters most. But it need not divert us from our long-term goals and our commitment to strive for excellence in serving the citizens of our unique community.

For more details on the plan, what priorities are being fully funded, what services are being reduced, what expenses are being cut and what programs are being eliminated -- see the first item on the City's budget page here.

Turning point

The World Bank now estimates that for the first time since World War II, the global economy will shrink this year. The slow down that began in December 2007 in the United States has now become what the head of the International Monetary Fund is calling "The Great Recession."

American eyes are fixated on Washington where each week plans costing billions and even trillions are launched or modified. But as the L.A. Times Business section noted this morning, "The $787-billion stimulus package that President Obama signed into law is a drop in the bucket for a world economy that produces $78 trillion in goods and services each year."

That turns out to be the flip side of the bounty of globalization which kept down inflation and brought all of us access to big screen televisions. As Thomas Friedman wrote this week, "We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese … We can't do this anymore."

If Friedman is right, the economic downturn is not a cyclical event that we will "recover" from in a year or two. It is a fundamental shift away from a debt-fueled consumer economy to . . . well, it is a little early to tell.

Here in Ventura, we remain insulated from the harshest signs of the economy "falling off a cliff" as Warren Buffet observed this week. But we are deeply affected by the unfolding crisis. Today, we delivered to the City Council our "Redesign Plan" for creating a "leaner and greener organization" to deliver the results that matter most to Ventura residents. It is a two-year budget plan for operating within available resources. The plan reduces expenses by $11.4 million through reducing compensation, staff and services to the community. It puts highest priority on protecting public safety and proposes sweeping changes in the way we do business. One of the most significant changes involves looking ahead to a more sustainable model for prosperity. For too long, cities have chased sales tax dollars in fierce and expensive competition with neighboring communities. But we can't do this anymore. We need to refocus our attention to the high wage, high value jobs that generate the wealth that supports the retail sector. Ventura's Redesign Plan reorganizes and refocuses our efforts to meet the challenges of the new economy. Given the high cost of doing business in coastal California, we must take advantage of the assets we have. Last year, Fortune Small Business"scoured the country for towns that combine a great business environment with alluring leisure offerings" and put Ventura on their "Top 100 Places to Live and Launch." Can globally competitive companies thrive in this environment? Look at Patagonia, recently featured on the cover of Fortune as "The Coolest Company on the Planet." Sales last year? Nearly $300 million worldwide. Not bad for a Ventura-based company whose mission is to "Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis." Can their success inspire others? It already has -- including companies like Walmart and GE whose top corporate officers have made pilgrimages to the company's headquarters to learn more about their policies and practices. And it can inspire a different approach to economic development -- looking forward toward an emerging economy instead of backward at the one now in deep crisis.