Menlo Park City Budget and City Services

By Michael A. "Mike" Lambert

Balance budget while maintaining needed services

Menlo Park has been fortunate in the past to have accumulated a healthy reserve, over $28 million. This has allowed our city to maintain a AAA bond rating. If our reserves diminish, there is a strong likelihood that our bond rating would diminish as well, which would result in greater interest expense to the city. In order to balance the increased expenses, revenue enhancements must to be provided. 

There are opportunities to increase revenues without increasing taxes. Some examples that I would offer are as follows. Our police department could offer alarm monitoring services for those who have alarm systems. With 3000 alarm systems (commercial and residential) currently in the city, gross revenue would be over $750,000 per year if all systems were monitored by the city. Another possibility is a new 300 room hotel. The transient occupancy tax paid by visitors to Menlo Park from that hotel alone would probably exceed $1.5 million per year at 50% occupancy. We need to continue to strive for new and creative ideas to increase city revenue in order to maintain our city services.

The city of Menlo Park is primarily a service provider to our community. Our residents and businesses are not only customers, but analogous to a corporation, they are the stockholders as well. The City staff's primary responsibility is to provide services to our community in alignment with the policies established by the City Council. Those services must be provided in a timely manner with a focus on customer satisfaction. City government should be there to effectively make our lives easier not more difficult. Our ordinances should be simple, to the point and understandable. The ordinance "stick" should only be used when the educational carrot "fails". The City should be frugal with the taxpayer dollars it receives, and should try to get the most "bang for the buck" on every dollar it spends.