Morgan Hill Direction

By Steve Tate

With dynaminc leadership, fiscal responsibility, emphasis on safety and preserving our community values, Morgan Hill can become even better!

• Community Values
• Dynamic Leadership
• Fiscal Responsibility
• Emphasis on Safety

Our residents frequently boast about the very special feeling our community embodies. Expressed frequently as our "small town feel" or as a sense of "friendly openness", people simply like living here. The value that our residents place on our quality of life is something that we need to strongly embrace, maintain and try to enhance.

Our community is enhanced by its great volunteer spirit, where residents willingly and eagerly support our schools, youth recreation and sports, the city through its commissions and committees, and our terrific events like the Fourth of July and Taste of Morgan Hill. Our get-it-done attitude is exemplary, we need to encourage and promote its continuation.

We need to also continue to emphasize providing opportunities for our youth so they can flourish, developing positive assets for success. Support for our senior population is also important, recognizing the great contributions they have made to us. Making the youth and senior components of the new Centennial Recreation Center successful, valuing and enriching the users of these facilities and creating joint opportunities for them to interact are important objectives.

Downtown is a big part of our "small town feel" and we need to continue to strongly emphasize its economic success and vibrancy as a special place in our community. We created a downtown plan in 2003 that provides a strong basis for doing this. The County Courthouse is under construction and we've started projects on Depot Street and 3rd Street. We've also approved an influx of housing in the downtown area and need to bring more, making sure that housing/retail mixed use is optimally positioned.

Recreation plays a big role in our community. So many of our youth are involved in sports and we have an active adult population as well. The Aquatics Center has already enhanced our recreation base and the soon-to-open Centennial Recreation Center will improve it dramatically. Upgrades to Community Park and conversion of the Murphy Avenue soccer fields to an Outdoor Sports Complex should allow Morgan Hill to achieve the very high level of recreation services our residents want.

Through our competitive process for housing allocations, Morgan Hill has done an admirable job of providing affordable housing opportunities. This is an area of continuing emphasis - we need to be "obtainable", able to accommodate people who want to live in our community. Continued focus on and innovation in housing affordability is needed.

Improving our quality of life while valuing and enriching our youth and seniors, enhancing the vibrancy of downtown, meeting demands for recreational services and making Morgan Hill obtainable for those who want to live here are how we can preserve and enhance our Morgan Hill community values.

Dynamic Leadership

In the mid-1990s, the Morgan Hill City Council had a reputation for discord and rancor. Since I joined the council in 1998, we've come a long way toward correcting the divisiveness. We are courteous, respectful and observe our new values-based ethics policy. We've achieved a level of operation that has allowed us to work collaboratively, thereby increasing our productivity.

With a concerted effort, we can take it to another, even higher, level. We can build an even stronger level of collaboration that will provide the consensus needed to accomplish even more. Council and commission/committee operations in meetings, assignments, and interactions can be improved + streamlined to better meet our objectives. We can better utilize council skills and existing partnerships to more effectively achieve goals, and to build Morgan Hill's credibility among regional partners, giving us a stronger voice.

We currently do a good job of establishing annual goals and objectives. We now need to take it a step further, making sure we prioritize them and deploy responsibility for them in a way that is optimal for successful accomplishment. The council, staff, commissions/committees and the interested public all need to be on the same page in terms of the City's goals, objectives, priorities and responsibilities.

Fiscal Responsibility

The city is spending more than we have revenue to cover, a deficit spending situation that is justified by the fact that we were able to build up significant reserves in the past. This is a situation that needs to be corrected before we deplete the reserves, and the council is very cognizant of that need and has adopted a sustainable budget strategy, a course of action to reduce expenses and increase revenues so that we will be in balance by mid-2008. We are very fortunate that our reserves will allow us to continue providing current service levels while we implement the strategy.

The implementation of the strategy relies extensively on public input. We are using surveys and structured conversations with interested citizens in formulating our specific actions on the budget. Any increase in revenues through taxation would require a vote, the ultimate public approval process, so we are testing any actions very carefully in public forums. These interchanges provide insight from suggestions and ideas that are generated. We definitely need to continue with public engagement, and plan to do so.

Careful, thoughtful planning for implementing the budget strategy is essential. Also, further planning is needed and being done to assure that we can reestablish reserves at a comfortable level for our future. While these activities are underway, we must protect ourselves from possible actions that would endanger our financial recovery. Committing to additional capitol projects that would put any additional drain on the General Fund for operations and maintenance is simply not acceptable.

Two things are clear now from where we are in the sustainable budget process. First, everyone agrees that responsible, well-planned economic development is needed to build city revenues. The regional retail center being constructed north of Cochrane Road and east of the 101 Freeway is a major step to boost revenue. We need to work with the developers and the downtown merchants to make sure each area serves a unique customer set and that synergy is built between them. We need a plan to bring in a couple more auto dealers in a location acceptable to them and to our residents.

The second thing we will need to do is extend our Redevelopment Agency, placing an emphasis on projects that continue to eradicate blight while also providing economic benefits. A good example is the need for additional parking in the downtown area. Remaining blighted situations and many opportunities to improve our economic climate make the RDA extension mandatory, but we do not need to include the entire current area in the extension. By excluding the Business Park areas that have completed their redevelopment, we will be able to significantly enhance general fund revenues.

Emphasis on Safety

More focus on priorities will help increase our productivity from a policy standpoint, as discussed in the Dynamic Leadership area. And we need to always keep in focus the fact that public safety is the highest priority of local government.

Several years ago, we updated our Fire Master Plan for Morgan Hill, and it calls for the establishment of a third firehouse in the city while maintaining our relationship with South County Fire for support from their station for the southern area. Our population continues to grow, now surpassing 37,000 and it is time to complete the planning for this third station and to figure out how to support it. Unfortunately, you can't just a add one or two firefighters when you open a new station, you need to fully support 24/7/365 staffing of a three person crew, so it is about 11 full time equivalent positions. It will be a formidable challenge to fund this third station, but the importance of fire and emergency medical protection to our citizens makes it mandatory.

For years we have had the lowest ratio of sworn police officers to citizens in Santa Clara County. The productivity of our police force and our relatively low ranking in crimes does help to justify the lower staffing levels, but we do need to find a way to assure that we at least maintain our current per capita police staffing. There are areas where our excellent community policing approach currently needs augmentation. For example with the opening of Sobrato High School, we really need a third School Resource Officer to provide the same level of support that we had with two officers to cover Live Oak, Central and Britton.

Within our budget, we need to assure that we do not decrease either funding or staffing in any area of public safety, placing it at the top of our priority list where it belongs.

Summary

We can make the quality of life in Morgan Hill even better than our residents now enjoy. To do so, we must embrace our existing Community Values while exercising Dynamic Leadership to become more effective and efficient. With Fiscal Responsibility, we will achieve a sustainable budget with adequate reserves, always placing an Emphasis on Safety, our highest priority for city services.