I know that for most of you talking about the budget for the
City of Marina is about as interesting as watching the grass die in a drought.
However, this is the document that the City needs to provide the direction to
operate for the coming fiscal year. It will determine the number of city
employees in each department (police, fire, recreation, planning, etc.), it
will determine how much to spend on pot hole repairs, park and facility maintenance,
and all the functions of a City.
It is with this in mind that I ask you to sacrifice a few
hours of your life and attend the City Council meeting this Tuesday night (June
10th at 6pm) to listen and provide your input on the choices before
the City Council. I will try to give you an outline of the issue I think is
most important in a single paragraph.
The City Council passed a resolution a couple of years ago
to “balance” the City budget under the definition of “monies in equal’s monies
out” in a given fiscal year. On the surface that sounds great but it also
ignores the $7,000,000 in reserves the City currently has. As a result the City
Council has been cutting vital services to all our City departments while maintaining
an oversized reserve fund.
At the same time, the City Council will be finalizing plans
to bring Measures M and N before the citizens in November for extension. It
seems to me that asking citizens to continue the TOT and Sales Taxes while not
using the funds already available to them is disingenuous.
While no one is demanding that we use all of our reserves,
we do ask that a basic level of service be provided to our Police and Fire
departments, our Recreation department, our Public Works department and all the
others that provide the services we as Marina citizens expect and voted for the
first time with Measures M and N. But just like your own budget, you set aside
in savings monies to buy a car, replace a roof or for other big expenditures,
the City has these funds set aside to use to replace old equipment, repair or
replace worn out streets or maintain a basic level of service.
For some reason, this Council wants to use these funds to
someday buy more land or some other plan they do not articulate rather than
provide the services that 21,000 current Marina citizens expect and need. They
would rather reduce staff in the Recreation department in the middle of summer,
not fill positions in the Police and Fire departments, not replace worn out
vehicles, not provide proper Library building maintenance and more. Although
you could do all of these at once with the reserves, no one expects that. Rather,
what is needed is a fair plan to use our reserves to work through a very long
list of deferred issues and proper staffing as identified by the staff.
So it is with this back drop that I ask my fellow Marina
citizens to attend Tuesday night’s meeting and help express the Community’s
views and priorities on an issue that affects our own daily life within our
community.
More later…
