City Council Post Mortem

Tuesday night's City Council meeting was not something that I or the City Council ever wanted to experience. It is painful to watch employees denigrate their fellow employees and painful to see spouses feeling the need to defend the city worker they live with.

All of our employees provide important services to the public. Whether it is the worker who makes sure that your toilet flushes, or the worker who keeps your park maintained or officers who respond to emergencies--they all play an important role. While public safety is critical, is it really more critical than making sure that your toilet works or your water flows or that your roads are passable? Certainly, when someone calls 9-1-1, there is no one more important than that officer. On the other hand, there wouldn't be any residents in this city if we couldn't provide them with basic services. I can also assure you that there would be more criminals migrating to town if our parks weren't maintained or if our codes weren't enforced.

The bottom line is that we wouldn't be having this debate if the economy weren't at its lowest point in the past 75 years and we are in the part of the country most severely impacted by this recession. The bloggers on the Manteca Bulletin site and many of the speakers Tuesday night seemed to be focused on finding the villan in this mess. The villan is the economy--everything else is a biproduct of a revenue downturn that none of us could have ever predicted.

My goal is to try and keep our municipal corporation intact during this difficult time. The City Council and I realize that every aspect of city government must suffer and that NO part of our operation is completely immune from this downturn. Frankly, the cutting has been going on since the day I got here and the cutting has not been equal. There are plenty of areas in this operation that have suffered greater cuts than Police, because public safety is a high priority. The fact that our officers are among the highest paid employees in the city reinforces the city's focus on public safety. However, being a high priority doesn't make one completely immune from the cuts.

The proposed agreement for Police is NOT an all or nothing proposition. It is the absolute minimum we can take from the operation without creating irretrievable losses in the rest of the city's operation. In addition, while most city employees are taking furloughs with nothing in return--the Police officers are getting the time back in return--and while the rest of the employees received a 4 percent adjustment last January, the officers received six percent. Thus, the officers have not been treated the same, public safety has received special consideration.

In addition, I'm tired of hearing about the lack of trust. I have been upfront with the MPOA from day one. I never, ever claimed last fall that the furloughs (which aren't even costing the officers anything in the long run) would be the final solution for our budget woes. Not only did I make it clear that we would need to come back if our budget situation continued to deteriorate, I also held a meeting for all of the membership of the union on May 4, 2009. That meeting was to make it clear that more concessions would be needed to bridge the budget gap--we just didn't have final numbers yet. As most of you recall, we wanted to wait until all of our revenue numbers were in before coming up with a cost reduction proposal.

This is not a game where we ask for 50 dollars, hoping we can get $25. We purposely waited until every number was available before we determined what the labor cuts needed to be. We also dug up every dollar we could find to go towards reducing the number. The City is going to be accessing every dollar we have available in reserve (and then some) to keep these cuts to a minimum. If we had to balance the budget this year without these reserves, we'd have to ask for these salary cuts AND have massive layoffs.

We are doing everything we can to preserve jobs and keep service levels up in the community. I can't believe that people don't understand that. Times are extremely tough and other than our immediate family members, I don't think there are many people in the community who feel that anyone in government is immune from salary cuts. Just do a google search of city budgets, and count the thousands of cities experiencing exactly what we are going through now.

This need to cut compensation isn't to try and punish one group, or to break a union or cobble away money from some special project. This is an attempt to survive a problem that is nationwide--except that it is even worse here in the Valley. No City Council, no City Manager, no palm reader could have predicted this. This isn't a conspiracy, it is reality and I would prefer we find a way to survive this by banding together instead of breaking apart.