WHAT DO Arnold Schwarzenegger and the City of San Buenaventura have in common these days besides long names starting with an S? They both have floated proposals to increase fees to help bail out our public safety agencies.
While our governor is proposing a 1.25 percent surcharge on property insurance policies which is expected to raise $125 million to fund a larger state fire fighting unit, the City of Ventura is proposing to add a $1.49 monthly fee to household and business phone lines to cover the costs of its 911 call center.
Low-income users would be exempt. Businesses with multiple lines would get a break. Residents could also waive the monthly fee and choose a per-call fee of $51.62, which would not be charged if the subscriber was calling for emergency aid at locations other than his or her residence or business.
The fees are expected to cover 85 percent of the $3.3 million yearly costs of providing the 911 service to residents.
WHILE THERE is nothing more important than adequately funding our public safety needs, some have complained these fees are just an end run around raising taxes.
Raising taxes is not easy, and it shouldn't be. Our city's 2006 efforts to raise the sales tax by 1/4 cent to fund public safety fell just short of the 2/3 margin needed to pass. And any proposal to raise taxes on the state level needs an equal margin to pass in the legislature. This would require a few of the Republican minority to vote for it. And they have vowed as a block to resist. But, in most cases, a fee requires a simple majority vote in the state legislature. In Ventura, it just needs the affirmative vote of four council members.
So new fees are becoming the last resort of public officials looking for ways to increase safety budgets. In Ventura's case, the money which the fees will raise frees up other dollars in the city's general fund to hire three new firefighters and six more police officers, according to Assistant Police Chief Ken Corney. Three of those officers would be School Resource Officers which were sorely missed in our schools when the program was cut in 2004.
Some may quibble with the new fees, but the price we pay for inadequate public safety is much higher.
For the full text of the proposed 911 fee go here.
What do you think? Post a comment below.
What if most people waive the fee? If it is only applied when calling from home then how much money could it raise?
Let me weigh in on this one. I was a HUGE supporter/endorser of P6. I really thought it was a level solution and that was not going to be a major impact. We needed the extra public safety measures and services that were lacking for the lack of basic services, and to be competitive with other communities who offered more/ higher salaries to hire the same employee pool.
However,this one is entirely different for me. This one impacts negatively on another level, for other populations in our community.
Not a fan....of THIS plan.
I also supported P6. This fee is not the way to go. I don't want to have to weigh the $50 charge if I'm facing a potential emergency. I've never used 911, but if I have to, the cost should not be a consideration.
I forgot to add, gorgeous looking K9 at top of blog!
hmmm.. isn't the 911 service a service the government is supposed to cover with our tax dollars already? Taxpayers all over are getting nickeled and dimed to death everywhere these days. I'd rather see a user's fee on things like this. Ditto the Gov.'s plan for the proposed firefighting tax on those of us who do not live in the forest or high-risk areas. Let the residents of high-fire risk areas pay for it.
The problem seems to be this: If they impose the flat monthly 911 fee on everyone, it could be challenged in court, as similar fees were up North. To get around the legal ambiguities, they presented the option of waiving it and instead charging $51.62 when it is used. But would this then discourage legitimate 911 use?
Another solution: Would some citizens willingly impose the monthly fee on themselves if they received notice that the money collected could free up other funds for additional public safety personnel? 62 percent voted to do just that with the public safety tax in 2006.
I am completely opposed to this tax and I will tell you why. There is no guarantee that the money will be used for its intended purpose. What's to prevent the Council from shifting the money they save from the 911 system to another purpose (like studying the Victoria Corridor again, as an absurd, but quite possible, example) in future years if the economy tanks further and they decide to spend it on something other than public safety.
Besides, we should be able to vote on this. I'm feeling a ground swell of opposition percolating under this thing. No thanks, guys!!!
If this thing passes, I think I would opt for the $50/call fee. You'd be foolish not to. I've lived in Ventura for 37 years and have never once called 911. Even if I had to, if it's an emergency call, there would be no charge, so what's the down side? And how would they even collect it, even it was chargeable? What are they going to do, not respond to my future 911 calls because I didn't pay a previous charge?
If I was to pay the monthly fee per phone, it would cost me over $100 a year, with 2 land lines and 4 cell phones in my household. That's too much to pay! And I agree with "More Taxes", we should be able to vote on this like any other tax. This is a tax. Don't be fooled into thinking it's not by the slick-talking City Attorney.
Am I being censored here too?
Not unless you think you need to be, nobody!
Hey the Girl,
If it were a tax, then there would be no guarantee that it would be spent on the 911 call center. But it's not a tax. It's a fee. If you opt in, you pay $1.49 per month per phone line for access to 911. If you opt out, you pay $50 per call. Either way, it's a fee that the city will have to use to defray the cost of the 911 call center and for no other purpose.
It is definitely a tax! It is a specific charge that will, in effect, create a revenue stream to be used for hiring public safety personnel - just like P6 would have done, another tax. The City Council just decided to reject Wal-Mart from coming into the City by overly restricting the square footage for its proposed store on Victoria, so it has to make up for the lost retail sales tax somehow.
The issue with this new tax is that it is intended to be used to fund police and fire staffing, but there is no guarantee the money will be used for any such thing. This is a farce! Vote it down Council!!!
Hey Business for Ventura,
On the one hand, you say that it's a tax because the City will create a revenue stream to be used for hiring public safety personnel. On the other hand, you say that the problem with the tax is that there is no guarantee that it WILL be used to pay for public safety.
Which is it?
A fee is a tax is a fee- it's semantics people. Call it what you will. My point in my previous post is that we already pay taxes for things like roads, fire, police, schools, etc. Every now and then someone in government comes up with some special so-called fee to elicit revenue for something else from residents. Call it what you will- a tax or a fee- it makes no difference - A 911 call is NOT something extra people should pay for!!! We have never paid a separate fee for calling 911 before. It's in the regular budget. Why start now? What's next? Pay an extra $3 per week to get your street light fixed? Pay another $50 a month to have the fire dept. come if your home is burning down? Pay your teacher $10 so you can get a printed copy of your kid's report card? It's a never-ending, slipery slope I don't want to go down. This sort of thing just encourages more of the same, on and on until you and I are paying extra for everything.
Marie,
When you want html help please write.
I agree a fee can be a tax but when it is for a specific purpose that the whole public doesn't use ( say college tuition) there is a difference versus a phone bill which almost everyone pays.
Thanks for all your blog help, Brian. :-)
Reading all the responses has been interesting. I guess I don't mind paying the extra $1.49 a month if it will buy us more public safety personnel, specifically School Resource Officers. I supported P6.
I spend more than twice that daily for my tall Chai Tea Lattes at Starbucks.
The City Council will take this up tonight and it will be interesting to see how it all falls out.
It's both. That's the problem. The new tax "purports" to to pay for public safety personnel; however there is no way of knowing this is really going to happen, or will be discontinued in a year or two when the money is needed for something else.
The City is calling it a fee, so they can avoid getting the funds audited. If they were to call it a tax (which is what it is), they would have to spend the money on public safety. It's a shell game. Wake up and smell the coffee!!!
I won't add to the debate back and forth, but just a clarification:
The difference between a tax and a fee is not that the fee money can be used to support other services. In fact, there is an audit and the city can be sued if a fee exceeds the cost of providing a service.
But a more reasonable concern is the "lottery money" shell game -- that all the new money will go to Public Safety, but an equal amount will be siphoned off the existing level of support. So a paragraph is being added to the ordinance (as approved last month in concept by the Council) called "Maintenance of Effort." It uses the current budget as a baseline. 100% of the new revenue must be used for public safety, over and above the current budget for public safety. The baseline will be adjusted annually to ensure that remains the case for as long as the fee is collected.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether it is worth $1.49 a month to add police and firefighters so they arrive more quickly on scene when you call 911. But that's the issue, not balancing the city's budget.
Rick Cole
City Manager
Ventura for Business,
You seem quite sure of what you think will or won't happen, but I'm not sure you are right.
It's a fee that will be placed in a segregated account and cannot be used for anything other than defraying the cost of the 911 center. So you're wrong there.
If the cost of the 911 center goes down, the fee would come back to the council to be adjusted downward.
It's pretty easy to spout off and say what it does and doesn't do. But it does help to actually read the provisions of the proposal.
I read the entire ordinance, so don't you dare lecture me on what I should or shouldn't read. This is clearly a scam by the City to get more revenue in the door that it lost by not approving the Wal-Mart store. To say otherwise is being disingenous.
Neal Andrews said this himself tonight at the City Council meeting, which I also attended and spoke on the issue. Neal is the only one on that Council with any principle or integrity, as far as I'm concerned.
The real issue here is whether we are spending the money we already have wisely. In recent years public safety departments across the state have jacked up their pension plans from 60% of pay after 30 years of service to 90% of pay after 30 years of service. It should be little surprise that after jacking up public safety pensions by 50% the government now tells us that they need new taxes (or fees) to provide the same level of service that we already had.
I've brought this issue up many times and I've yet to hear a rational, factual explanation of why police officers and firefighters suddenly need full pay to retire as early as age 50. Previous generations of police officers and firefighters retired on just 60% pay after 30 years, and there were never any problems with recruiting or retention. Funding these kinds of benefits is extraordinarily expensive and a HUGE burden on taxpayers, with no tangible benefit to our communities. Before we dig into our pockets for more money perhaps we should re-visit whether these gold-plated perks are reasonable, especially when the taxpayers who fund these bloated pensions have to work until age 67 to get their full social security benefits, which are puny by comparison.
This isn't a funding problem, it is a spending problem.
So do you advocate that Ventura start hiring in more public safety personnel at a lower tier of pay and benefits? They already have trouble staffing as it is. These guys can go to neighboring areas and make more. If they paid less, they wouldn't have anyone to pay less.
The problem for Ventura is not that they can't recruit but that they don't have the funds to hire more staff. This is driven in a large part by the rising personnel costs that have been driven by escalating salaries and benefits. I don't have the figures for Ventura PD, but I do know that the annual cost of employing a single Ventura County Sheriffs Deputy now exceeds $200,000 per year. That includes all combined salary and benefit costs. At that cost you aren't going to be able to hire too many employees.
We need to take a serious look at these personnel costs to see if they can be managed better so that the existing budget can support more employees. Perks like 90 percent pensions at age 50 are extraordinarily expensive to fund and eat up a large part of the department personnel budget. I bet the department could add a lot of additional positions if it grandfathered in pension benefits to existing employees and rolled back benefits for new employees to 60 percent pensions after 30 year, which, until recently, was the standard public safety pension for generations.
I realize that the department has to compete against other public safety departments for personnel. However I am not convinced that pension benefits are a significant factor in recruiting and retaining employees. It would be far less expensive to offer slightly higher salaries, which I believe would more than offset the effect of reduced pension benefits.
Since this fee/tax is applying to cell phones as well, what happens when you are out of town and dial 911? Does this $50.00+ fee apply , or is it only when the call originates and applies to a location in the city limits? Our employees with cell phones travel throughout California and we travel out of state as well, so if anyone can answer this..Thank you!
It is my understanding that this only applies to calls originating in Ventura.
the letters to the star today were pretty tough on our elected officials and also on the idea of public art- does anyone know how public art is payed for?