Era of limits

To balance this year's budget, the City Council established a clear set of principles, starting with this overview:

To ensure increasingly limited resources are allocated to what matters most in achieving the General Plan Strategic Vision, the Council recognizes that tough choices will need to be made and that its emphasis will be placed on eliminating, reducing or restructuring lower-priority programs and expenses rather than compromising the success of high-priority efforts by inadequate funding.

Difficult and painful as it was, focusing on "what matters most" made it possible to reduce spending by $11 million. What it forces, however, is greater discipline about what we undertake because we have slashed capacity for taking on worthwhile additional work. There are 40 less people working for the city, but expectations remain high.

There was an old cartoon strip that ran for many years called, "There Ought to Be a Law." It was a send-up of the idea that for every problem, there was a legislative solution. The comic strip is long gone, but the impulse continues.

So the stream of well-intentioned citizen requests continues unabated, despite -- and in some cases, because of -- the economic reckoning we are enduring. One irate citizen demands the City put more emphasis on compliance with (and enforcement of) the Americans With Disabilities Act. Another frequent critic offers an ordinance from another city to ensure banks maintain foreclosed homes. A tireless citizen activist insists we come up with an amnesty program for illegal second-units. An advocate for marijuana access prods us to forge rules for implementing Proposition 215. A thoughtful fiscal conservative urges us to tackle the huge issue of local government pension reform.

All of these are legitimate concerns. So are the new mandates from other levels of government: the Regional Water Quality Board imposing a new and expensive permit to clean up stormwater run-off on all the cities in Ventura; the new regional planning framework imposed by SB 375; and the opportunities for securing competitive grants for Stimulus funding from the Federal government in everything from public safety to energy conservation.

The only hitch is: who is going to do all these things? Fiscal conservatives have a quick answer: nobody. Stick to the basics. Live within your means! Of course, like the old joke ("A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged), finding true fiscal conservatives is not so easy. People are often fiscal conservatives until you talk about cutting spending that affects their neighborhood, business or pet cause. I often hear, Cut out all that unnecessary 'stuff' . . . but don't cut out the arts or pay for dredging the Keys or help out Mrs. Yunker or whatever they don't individually see as 'unnecessary.' With 106,000 citizens, it turns out that there is a wide range of opinion on what is and is not 'unnecessary.'

Then there are others, fairly numerous in our community, who cheerfully acknowledge they understand we have limited resources and volunteer they'd be happy to pay 'a little more' so the city could do more on the homeless issue or code enforcement or protecting the hillsides or save a County library or . . . except that without a majority (or even 2/3rds vote) we don't actually have those additional resources to address their concerns.

So, how in an era of limits, do we balance the very real constraints on our staff time and financial resources?

There are two paths open. One is to stick with "what matters most" and let people know that their concerns will have to wait until we have the staff and resources to devote to them. The other is to give the voters an opportunity to restore some of the capacity we've lost as revenue has fallen.

What we can't do is what the State has done -- try to be all things to all people and duck hard choices.

Contrary to some stereotypes, politicians and bureaucrats aren't cursed with a character failing of spending like drunken sailors. But almost everyone drawn to local public service wants to solve problems and improve their community. Now is a challenging time. The number one problem we face is ensuring we don't spend money we don't have. That isn't a happy message to convey. But it is a message most people will understand, even if they aren't happy about it.

As our Police Chief Pat Miller reminds me, "We can do anything. We just can't do everything." Or as my great grandmother used to tell me, "If it is worth doing at all, it is worth doing right." We can't provide every taxpayer a solution to their problems. Instead, if we don't spread ourselves too thin, we can provide every taxpayer with value for their dollar.