City finances

By Barbara Denny

We must end the wasteful practices and prevent another attempt to raise taxes. It's time to let the scales drop from our eyes and take a long, hard look at our city finances. Coronado needs a Mayor who has the time, energy and discipline to master our complex city finances.

(1) The State of California dealt a major blow to our budget in February of this year by legislating the end of redevelopment. This situation leaves us with approximately $375 million of redevelopment debt to be paid off in part every year for the next two decades. The truth is that there is no more property tax increment financing (TIF) to pay off our redevelopment debt. Now, every six months we must report our redevelopment debt to the State Department of Finance and hope that our request will be granted for the funds to make repayment. We are in a precarious situation. How will we accomplish our redevelopment debt repayment now that we receive overall less than half of the property tax increment that we used to receive before the end of redevelopment? At best, it's naïve for elected officials to deny the negative impact of redevelopment's demise upon our city budget.

(2) We must quantify and address our court-ordered responsibility to maintain the waterways in the Coronado Cays. Will it cost $300,000 or $500,000 or more? The longer we wait to address our legal responsibility for waterways maintenance, the more expensive it will become for us. We owe it to our neighbors in the Cays to take our responsibility seriously and to get it done.

(3) We must quantify and begin to fund our unfunded pension liability. We don't want to get into trouble down the road like other cities.

We are blessed with a strong tax base. Yet this dreadful economy and the above three issues mean that we can't afford any financial missteps. There is no "safety cushion" for financial error now that the redevelopment spigot of tax increment was shut off.

Our city wastes taxpayers' dollars in many ways. As Mayor, I'll provide strong leadership to stop the waste of public funds:

(A) I'll ensure that we stop placing unnecessary and unwanted projects in our Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), which is an integral part of our annual budget, while omitting necessary and wanted projects. Instead of constructing more toilets for our visitors in an area that provides more than enough public toilets, how about starting to renovate our Senior Center for our beloved Seniors who served our town and our country so well? In other words, we must immediately remove from our CIP the Shores Beach Toilet Project currently being planned in the narrowest, most sensitive part of our beach in front of the Coronado Shores. The planned toilet location is on an active earthquake fault at Avenida del Sol across the Silver Strand from the public restrooms in the Marina Building, City Hall, Community Center and Boathouse. We owe it to our neighbors in the Shores to stop wasting taxpayers' dollars and everyone's time pursuing a foolish Beach Toilet Project that will result in major negative impacts to their quality of life and property values as well as our beach. We must immediately move to the top of our priority list the construction of the Senior Center renovation. The Senior Center project is long overdue by decades, yet the construction phase of this project didn't even make it into the CIP part of our budget this year.

(B) One of my first acts as Mayor will be to disband the current mayor's ad hoc committee that controls capital project priority and completion. This ad hoc committee operates behind closed doors without public input and is subject to manipulation by special interests. By disbanding the current mayor's ad hoc committee, I'll protect Coronado residents and put residents first by ensuring that their Mayor will no longer be able to block and to alter certain capital projects while aggressively promoting other projects to enrich special interests.

(C) I'll put an immediate end to the cozy, longstanding relationships that exist between the city and many service providers. We must make open, competitive bidding the rule in Coronado + instead of the exception. In its entire history, our city has never opened up garbage collection to competitive bidding. This raises the question: Are we overpaying for garbage collection in Coronado? And if so, for what else are we overpaying because we fail to follow the reasonable policy of open, competitive bidding?

In addition, I'll provide guidance so that our city invites and encourages local business owners to take part in open, competitive bidding for contracts with the city.

(D) I'll stop the waste of taxpayers' dollars on re-paving streets that don't need it just because someone devised a re-paving schedule many years ago. We should pay closer attention to the condition of our streets and make the choice to re-pave only those streets that truly need maintenance work. This will save taxpayer dollars and minimize the noise and disruption upon residents and business owners who lose sleep, patience and business when their streets are blocked for re-paving.

(E) I'll put an immediate end to the practice of illegally spending the Coronado Bridge Toll Revenue Fund monies on anything other than directly helping our neighbors who live in the Third & Fourth Street Corridor (the Corridor). We must stop budgeting for annual raids on our Toll Revenue Fund, as we have been doing every year for the past 12 years, to pay for things like the Coronado Tunnel Project and fixing drainage problems on Sixth Street and Orange Avenue. In the legal Settlement Agreement between the City of Coronado and SANDAG, dated and signed in the year 2000, our city officials promised that the Toll Revenue funds would only be spent to reduce the impact upon our neighbors in the Corridor of the increased traffic that resulted from the removal of the Bridge Toll. Therefore, it's wrong to pass annual budgets that continue to spend the Toll Revenue Fund monies on anything other than noise reducing windows, shrubbery and protective fencing for Corridor residents. Our neighbors in the Corridor need and deserve help now.

(F) Last but not least, I'll put an end to the millions of dollars of annual taxpayer subsidies. As one example, we waste public funds because we force our Coronado taxpayers to pay for a long list of development-related activities including construction inspections and fire inspections. The independent fee expert we hired gave us a report that said that Coronado -- unlike all surrounding towns -- fails to charge applicants anything for many development-related activities and charges applicants too little for many more development-related activities. He also said that we lose approximately $1.5 million per year as a result of our wasteful policy of taxpayer subsidy of development-related activity.

Instead of throwing yet another expert report on a shelf to gather dust, as Mayor I'll heed this reasonable expert advice. I'll build consensus to open that revenue stream by adopting a policy of "full cost recovery" for development-related activities because it's wrong to force our taxpayers to continue to subsidize building and construction on our island. To add insult to injury, our city's failure to adopt a "full cost recovery" policy for development-related activities means that in reality our Coronado taxpayers subsidize the over-development of our beautiful island.