Council Follow Up
At last night's City Council meeting, several items of note were approved by the City Council.
First of all, the Council took action to reduce their salaries by ten percent. While state law sets their salaries at $500 per month, nothing precludes the City Council from refusing to take all or a part of their salaries. Obviously, Council members are not doing this job for the money--given the countless hours they spend serving the community--they are earning far less than minumum wage for their efforts. However, the Council felt that it was important to earn even less to demonstrate that they are sympathetic to the fact that Manteca city employees (and most Manteca residents) are taking in less pay due to the downturn in the economy.
The Council also approved an expanded landscape maintenance district (LMD) for the Tesoro neighborhood. This subdivision was originally approved prior to the change in city policy that now requires all neighborhood maintenance costs to be borne by the neighborhood. If the city had implemented this requirement back in 1990s when it first put in LMD's for maintenance of street medians, the city wouldn't have needed to reduce the staffing for parks maintenance during these tough budget times. In any case, when the developer asked for some changes to its Development Agreement, they agreed to put the park into the LMD. This will save the general fund over $100,000 per year--more than enough to save the job of a parks maintenance worker.
The Council also approved a $72,000 contract to update the city's zoning ordinance. The city's current zoning code is woefully out of date and doesn't provide the flexibility staff and the development community desire to respond to ever-changing market conditions. Zoning updates typically cost two to three times the approved amount. However, in order to keep costs down, staff has done significant background work on the ordinance to keep outside costs at a minumum. While in the best of all worlds it would be great if staff could do all of this in-house, zoning documents are very complicated, techincal documents. They are a only a handful of planners in the state with the appropriate expertise to put together a document that is both user friendly and legally defensible.
I'll blog more in the future about all the benefits a well written zoning ordinance can bring to our community.
First of all, the Council took action to reduce their salaries by ten percent. While state law sets their salaries at $500 per month, nothing precludes the City Council from refusing to take all or a part of their salaries. Obviously, Council members are not doing this job for the money--given the countless hours they spend serving the community--they are earning far less than minumum wage for their efforts. However, the Council felt that it was important to earn even less to demonstrate that they are sympathetic to the fact that Manteca city employees (and most Manteca residents) are taking in less pay due to the downturn in the economy.
The Council also approved an expanded landscape maintenance district (LMD) for the Tesoro neighborhood. This subdivision was originally approved prior to the change in city policy that now requires all neighborhood maintenance costs to be borne by the neighborhood. If the city had implemented this requirement back in 1990s when it first put in LMD's for maintenance of street medians, the city wouldn't have needed to reduce the staffing for parks maintenance during these tough budget times. In any case, when the developer asked for some changes to its Development Agreement, they agreed to put the park into the LMD. This will save the general fund over $100,000 per year--more than enough to save the job of a parks maintenance worker.
The Council also approved a $72,000 contract to update the city's zoning ordinance. The city's current zoning code is woefully out of date and doesn't provide the flexibility staff and the development community desire to respond to ever-changing market conditions. Zoning updates typically cost two to three times the approved amount. However, in order to keep costs down, staff has done significant background work on the ordinance to keep outside costs at a minumum. While in the best of all worlds it would be great if staff could do all of this in-house, zoning documents are very complicated, techincal documents. They are a only a handful of planners in the state with the appropriate expertise to put together a document that is both user friendly and legally defensible.
I'll blog more in the future about all the benefits a well written zoning ordinance can bring to our community.
Labels: City Council
posted by City Manager @ 6:27 AM
1 Comments:
At August 10, 2009 3:50 PM ,
BILL.BREWER47 said...
I pasted this from your Blog.
The Council also approved an expanded landscape maintenance district (LMD) for the Tesoro neighborhood. This subdivision was originally approved prior to the change in city policy that now requires all neighborhood maintenance costs to be borne by the neighborhood. If the city had implemented this requirement back in 1990s when it first put in LMD's for maintenance of street medians, the city wouldn't have needed to reduce the staffing for parks maintenance during these tough budget times. In any case, when the developer asked for some changes to its Development Agreement, they agreed to put the park into the LMD. This will save the general fund over $100,000 per year--more than enough to save the job of a parks maintenance worker.
Why should the residents of the development pay for something the entire city and people from outside the city can use free of charge. THe city of Manteca or is that "Mantaxa" shifted the expense from the city general fund to the wallets and purses of the ~485 homeowners in the development.
The builders got a vote for each piece of undeveloped property and the few home owners got outvoted. This is the type of election I would expect to see in Communist China or North Korea to where the outcome has already been decided. The famous quote of Joseph Stalin comes to mind "that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how." in other words why have an election if the decision is already made.
Maybe, it is time we form a Manteca Taxpayer association to challenge the city Government and our city Council to spend our tax dollars wisely and not transfer a city wide responsibility to the wallets of a few.
Bill Brewer
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