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Hopper Warns Council, Residents Of “That Sucking Sound That You Will Hear…” By Bill Coburn
When I finally found time to watch the City Council meeting, I agreed that what Mr. Hopper said was of tremendous value to the community, and so I decided to run his address to the council, in its entirety, in the paper. I’d like to thank the City Manager and his assistant, Debbie Humphrey for their assistance in putting together the following (nearly) word for word account of Mr. Hopper’s address to the Council. I would also like to thank Mr. Hopper for taking the time to address the Council, and the City, and making us take a serious look at what we face. What he said needed to be said, and more importantly, it needed to be heard. I hope that those of you who read this article, will take it to heart, and become a part of the community process to address these issues, which are going to impact all of us, if not in perpetuity, certainly for some time to come.
Mr. Hopper began by stating that he thought it might be appropriate for him to make “a few comments or observations about where we stand given that straight forward but rather sobering effect of where we are going in this budget year. The first observation that I would make is that I think your Staff in past years and continuing now, continue to do an outstanding job in providing the highest level of service to the community with the fewest resources that you have available. And I made that comment when I first got here, that this is a remarkable City, that you do more with less than probably any city that I am aware of, but make no mistake, you are living off of your savings, and that is a very dangerous precedent to get comfortable with. You have no reliable ongoing revenue stream that can address your future expenditure levels and so you are going to have to do something. The fear that I have is that I think your staff will continue to do a very good job over the course of the next 12 months and the community will say Jeez, everything is okay, our parks are getting mowed, and we’ve got programs, and when I call 911 somebody shows up, and everything seems to be okay…but, while the next twelve months, and you’ve already seen that we’re going to be borrowing from reserves to get us through this next twelve months, and that twelve month period from the twelfth to the 24 month in your two-year budget, will be a period of time that if the Council does not take an action to solve some of your ongoing long-term budget issues, you will need to start severely cutting back services in order to try and meet the essential services for the community, and the community at that time may have the choice to decide what goes and what stays, but my sense, is of this community, that even the courage that gets you the All-America City Award is not going to solve your budget problems unless you make a direct action to say let’s move in that direction to solve some of these long-term issues.”
Hopper continued “And they are significant. We know tonight, we’ve talked about your street systems, you’ve done a remarkable job of getting grants and funds to correct and pave over 75% of your streets. It’s the other 25% that will cost you about $6 million that you don’t have, and you have no prospects of getting unless money comes forward from the State, in all likelihood, and the bigger problem is that we know that by not addressing some of those essential Public Works projects, streets especially, that number continues to rise substantially. The cost of repairing streets after they start to deteriorate, goes up at a much quicker rate than if we can at least try and maintain them, but maintaining the streets will probably be a tough chore for you, just going forward.
We talked about the Paramedic Program, that in two years, that funding source dries up. You don’t have money to address the Library needs, now or in the future. I had mentioned to you at the budget study session that one of the most attractive things about this community is that we are a Tree City U.S.A. We’ve got a great inventory of magnificent trees in this community and you’ve got $15,000 to do an $80,000 job, and that only gets your trees trimmed, maybe, once every 20 years. It is just not going to solve the long-term issues of what you do with your street tree inventory without addressing that, essentially, and that’s a relatively small number in comparison to everything else we do. Our parks, we’ve got great parks and we continue to add to the parks, but we haven’t asked the question, “Can we maintain what we are adding?” It also strikes me that this community likes to use its parks and has an expectation that these parks are going to be maintained at a level that everyone has come to enjoy and expect, and quite frankly, long-term going forward, that’s simply not going to be the case, and you may need to address that in a special way.
The legal costs have just been brutal on you in the last couple of years, the last five years probably. But, it was heartening tonight to see your City Attorney do a remarkable job in trying to steer us out of this litigation tangle, and I think that is going to be something that we continue to look forward to in the future. Even with that, we know litigation costs are going to be high. And quite frankly, this is just a very litigious community. Every time staff turns around in providing services there is the fear that if we do something wrong, it is going to incite a lawsuit, and so, like it or not, it is just part of the way that we do business in this community, and we are going to need to try to get past that and the City Attorney is doing a very good job in helping them move in that direction.
Development in the downtown, I think feels like right now, it’s essentially stalled. You’ve got two rather significant projects that sit empty. The one that’s right across the street, the Skilled Nursing Center, is a blight now on the community, and at the corner of Baldwin and Sierra Madre Boulevard, probably the most important corner in this community is stalled, additionally. I think that it is incumbent upon this Council to try and get these projects moving forward. Now, I also understand that there is the fear of how can we do this in the face of Measure V and the question of whether or not it applies or doesn’t apply. I would tell you that the same way that you approached the issues tonight on Stonehouse is the way that you should approach both of those projects as well. I have talked to both of those property owners and they are willing and anxious to try to get something going and they are very willing to try and come and meet the community’s expectations. I don’t know what that means entirely, if you said well we’ve got to hold to what we believe is the tightest development control in the downtown, I don’t know that either of those projects would legally have to because I believe they submitted their projects prior to Measure V going forward, but it really doesn’t matter. I think if in the spirit that you addressed the Stonehouse thing tonight, if you use that same common sense approach to say let’s meet and try and get a project that addresses the real needs and issues of the community and get these projects moving forward, two things would happen. One, you saw that the Redevelopment Agency Fund is also drying up and basically operating on reserves, it would send a new infusion of cash to the agency, because I’m assuming that those are all in the project area, but more importantly, when property owners in a downtown area as small as Sierra Madre begin to see meaningful investment, they will also bring additional investment back into their projects. Right now if all of us were not on this Council but investors in the community, we would all be wondering is this the place we want to invest, when we’ve got so many other options in Southern California. Is this the place that we want to invest given how this might be addressed by the community? It starts right here with this City Council, and I think that again the same approach that you addressed Stonehouse with tonight, if you took that same approach with those two property owners, and said let’s get something going, it may not get everybody everything that they want, but it would be an important first step, it would be a signal, not that you are going to attract a lot of development coming into the town. Quite frankly, the last time I looked at your borders, there was no long line of people saying I want to come in and build a significant project in town. I don’t think that is going to happen for the very reason that not only is your greatest asset your location, it’s also your greatest liability. You compete with high traffic areas in Pasadena, Arcadia, and Monrovia, all around this area, where quite frankly, the most attractive development is probably going to fall there. You are still going to be an attractive development for an investor who is looking at the long-term and it’s the people who own the buildings in the downtown who will continue to reinvest in their properties if given the right signal. I think that’s something, I don’t think that business will ever shoulder the most significant load of providing revenue sources in this community, but we need to move it forward, it needs to shoulder a larger load and generate more revenues than it is today, and it can, and the property assessment side of that can be a more significant investment for you in the long-term if we can move this forward, and I think that’s critical and I think that’s something that this community needs to address.
Out of all of this budget, we are not even able to include in this budget, reasonable cost of living adjustments for any of our employees, and you know that we stand in a lawsuit stance with the Police Officers Association tonight, and I think everyone, our general employees, our safety employees are all expecting that we are going to try and do our best. It is heartening that in this past year, the Council was able to give a 4% raise that was retroactive, so in this current year 06-07, the employees were brought up at a reasonable level, 4%, but nothing that we’ve included in this budget addresses the years going forward, and we know that we need to do something with our employees, and more importantly, the Police Officer’s Association has sent a very strong signal vis-à-vis a lawsuit to this community, that we‘ve got to do something. We can’t ignore it. There is no ongoing revenue source that will ever come close to addressing what the Police Officer’s Association demands are. Quite frankly you would have to close the library and you would probably have to close down such a significant operation in Recreation, that you would just be able to keep the YAC open as a drop-in facility with no meaningful operations or no meaningful amount of staff in order to provide the level of services that you expect in this community. We’re going to need to look at a long-term ongoing revenue source to provide for salary demands in the future.
I think, in summarizing, there’s a couple of things that obviously need to be done and I pontificated way too much probably on the business side of that but I feel passionately that this is not an issue about development in the downtown. This is an issue about investment in the downtown, it’s about creating long-term value in the downtown and getting some of those projects moving will do that and it will help the downtown shoulder more of that long-term financial responsibility. The other side of that is that if we look around this community and we begin to like the things that we see, and I know this community treasures its small town character and would like to see things stay the same, but I don’t think that’s diminishing quality. I think that it’s an expectation that we are going to continue to have good value in every part of the community, including parks. We’re going to need to go back to the community and have a conversation about what your expectations are, and if their expectations are that we want good parks, we want our streets to be lighted, we want our trees to be trimmed, we want to be able to call 911 and have good police response and a good fire response, especially on paramedic services and those are things that we need, and want, and expect in this community, and we’ll continue to work hard to find grants to do all the other things that we do so well, the community is going to have to look at that and say that is a value that we want and expect, if the General fund, given what we know now about your long term revenues and the fact that, you know you’re not going to ever have a car dealership or a Home Depot or something that is going to generate a significant amount of revenue to the community and if property values just continue to go along at a reasonable level, we’ll keep providing a reasonable level of service in all these other areas, but the ones that you can’t fund, people are going to have say, I want them and by gosh, I’m going to be willing to write a check for those services. Or, the option is that we say, let’s go without, because that is a realistic option, to say we jus twill not provide those services any longer and if we need to do something, then we’ll address it at that time.
Your lighting districts are not even paying their own way anymore, and I think it’s a sense that we are all afraid to ask the question to the community are you willing to, under Prop 218, put this to a vote and ask the community that we ought to keep the streetlights on and everybody ought to pay for that. But if they said “No” then it becomes an obligation of the General Fund to find a way to fund that, and that is a huge risk that we run, so I’m saying that we really do need to go back to this community and say that if you like this town and you like the way it looks and you want to do these things in the future, then by gosh, we’rere going to have to start shouldering some of that responsibility, because the other things that will help shoulder that responsibility are things that you’ve already told us that you really don’t want. You want to keep this town pretty close to the way it is today, we want to increase the value, we want to make things nicer, but we don’t want to grow. And without the growth, we need to look internally to say, that’s fine, if that’s a value we have then let’s hold it, and let’s fund it and let’s move forward, or decide that we go without. It’s a pretty clear choice for the community, but it’s one that’s going to have to be made because in the next twelve months, if you don’t have a plan, I guarantee you that sucking sound that you will hear from month 12 to 24, will be all of the remaining funds drying up, because you are not going to be able to fund those services in the future and I don’t think this community is going to like that one bit. But we can give them the choice.” |
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