Our last few posts about the proposed city income tax have not only initiated a lot of good, substantive conversations, but they’ve also led to quite a few more questions. Case in point… a couple of days ago, I received the following note from a reader of this site named Erika.

Hi Mark, thanks for your continued coverage of Ypsi issues. I was wondering if you could help assemble and publish a list of city services that would no longer be possible or reliable if the income tax and milages don’t pass? I don’t think people really understand what it would mean to live in a city that wasn’t “intact” or “functional” or “sustainable”. So many of the newspaper articles mention that, but the only things that ever come up are police and fire. What are some other services that the city offers which could be impacted, reduced or cut? Off the top of my head, I am thinking trash/recycling/yard waste removal, snow plowing/salting, road maintenance/signs, ordinance/code enforcement, issuance of building permits, assessor services, clerk services, street lighting, mowing/maintenance at parks… what else? Also, what are some examples of life without these services? No one to issue building permits: serious delays in renovation/improvement of buildings in the city. No one to pick up recycling: cart all of your recycling to the Ann Arbor recycle center in your own car, pay a fee. No one to replace damaged road signs: missing road signs. No street lights: dark streets. We need to paint a picture in better detail so people can actually understand that this is real, that things they take for granted or assume just happen by magic are going to stop happening. I don’t really know what I am talking about here, I am just guessing on some of this stuff… who would be able to describe all of this in better detail? Paul Schrieber? Ed Koryzno? Frances McMullin? Thoughts?

Well, I took the opportunity to forward Erika’s email to a few people who that I thought might have something useful to say on the matter, as well as all of the current members of Ypsilanti City Council. Following are the responses that I’ve received thus far. Hopefully you’ll find them informative. I’m sure, based on the conversations we’ve had thus far, that some of you out there will refer to these comments as “scare tactics”, intended to promote the pro-income tax agenda. All I can say is that I’m trying, as best as I can, to provide factual information. Yes, it may be scary, but sometimes the truth is. If you have facts contrary to those which are being shared, though, I’d encourage you to leave a comment. And I’ll do my best to see that your concerns are addressed.

MICHAEL BODARY, Council Member:
Questions about what we have left in departments other than police and fire have been asked and I will try to answer some, but others may chime in with others. I’m only speaking off the cuff now. Generally we try to make changes when someone moves on so we are not leaving them unemployed. Recently we outsourced our assessor’s position to a 2 day a week contracted position with more time during hearings. We also contract with Pittsfield Twp. for inspections on an as needed basis. Private firms do other specific inspections and are paid by the collected fees. We have a full time person doing small building rental inspections but our main inspections officer Mr Frank Daniels Jr. does larger buildings as time allows. he is assisted by Mr. Jackson who enforces city code violations. Parking ticket collections are outsourced and we have seen a increase in payments and settlements. Violations are subject to the Administrative Hearings Bureau and fines are used to defray costs. Each section of administration has downsized and may have more cuts necessary. Many jobs have been combined, especially in city hall where people wear multiple hats as needed.

BRIAN ROBB, Council Member:
In every scenario under consideration, we need to cut $700K out of the FYE 2013 budget that we will adopt in June. We don’t know what those cuts will be yet. In November we asked Mr. Koryzno to come up with a list. That list is still being generated. A lot of things are going to get cut regardless of the election issues. We’ll make those decisions in May.

There is a separate millage for trash and recycling collection. We currently run a deficit and fund that deficit from the motor pool. The contract with Waste Management is up for renewal in 2013. Ypsi Twp’s contract is up at the same time. We could possibly get a better deal if both communities can negotiate one mega-contract. We tried to do this back in 2007, but Ypsi Twp’s contract didn’t line up with ours. They renewed their contract and planned to have it end when ours does in hopes of negotiating together. It’s possible we could go to pay to throw trash service, but if we did that, I’d imagine most residents would drop their trash off in front of City Hall. We could also privatize recycling. This could make sense when it comes time to replace the trucks that pick up recycling, but that’s not scheduled to happen any time soon. That’s a lot to take in at once, but it means that trash pick-up and recycling aren’t disappearing.

DPW is funded almost entirely from Act 51 funds. This is where damaged roads signs and snow removal comes from in the budget. In every scenario we’ve run, there are no lay-offs in public works.

The Building Department is nearly self-sustaining. It wouldn’t make any sense to lay anyone off from a department that pays for itself.

The City contracts for assessing services. We are legally required to provide assessing services on an annual basis.

The City Charter requires that we have a City Clerk. We have two people working in the Clerk’s department. Theoretically we could reduce that number to one, but it’s unlikely.

The City has a part-time ordinance enforcement officer. He’s awesome as far as I’m concerned. Theoretically we could get rid of him, but it’s unlikely.

The City has one employee dedicated to parks. Theoretically we could hire a corporate lawn service, but I’m not sure what savings would occur, if any.

The City spends around $580K annually on streetlighting. In November I asked about the legality of creating a streetlighting special assessment district. The idea is that each parcel would be assessed a share of that $580K and that expense would then come off the books. It’s not cutting costs as much as is making residents pay for yet another service. Garden City passed a variation of this proposal in October. Some members of Council are still on board with this, but I’m not. I could see a special assessment district that raised the capital to convert all lights to LED savings us as much as 30% a year ($180K), but we’d have to study it in order to find real numbers.

The only thing on your list that I haven’t address yet is road maintenance. We ran out of money to do roads a few years ago. East Cross was done with ARRA money. West Cross is being done with money we sat aside during the FYE 2010 budgetting process (hoping we would also get ARRA money). The two biggest road projects left are Grove Road and Huron River Drive. I don’t think we’ll be in the TIP plan for Grove Road until 2016. The first street millage falls off the books in FYE 2017 with the second expiring in FYE 2019. We could always renew those, but that’s a bit complicated since those were for local streets and what remains are major streets.

Back in November, City Staff gave us the average cost of a General Fund employee (i.e. not DPW) as being $75,989. There are 72.88 General Fund employees in the City. According to City Staff, that means General Fund employees cost us $5,538,078. If our total General Fund revenues for FYE 2012 were $11,797,305, the City spends $6,259,227 on things that aren’t employees (i.e. streetlighting, insurance, legal costs, Water Street debt, etc.).

By FYE 2017, a Water Street debt retirement millage will add 5.9971 mils to your taxes. In addition, the Fire & Police pension millage will have risen to 15.2972 (an increase of 8.974 over today’s millage rate). That’s a 14.9711 increase in the next five years. I only add those numbers for the surreal factor plus the fact that no one seems to be talking ablut the massive F&P pension millage increases.

Now that may sound like a very significant tax increase, but the good news is we’re expecting the value of your home to drop 18%.

I also need to mention that even with a income tax and 15 mils of property tax increases, we’ll still need to cut another $700K from the FYE 2015 budget, so don’t let anyone convince you that these ballot measures are going to “maintain” services at their current levels. These ballot measures are going to allow us to only cut $1.4M out of the budget over the next three years.

Obviously these are not the answers you wanted, but no one is going to be able to tell you we’re going to cut X of these, Y of these, and Z of these because we haven’t identified them yet.

PETE MURDOCK, Council Member:
As with everything it’s complicated with City budgeting.

Clearly if our revenues are going down $4M from $14M to $10M over five years and we now have make payments for Water Street Debt ($1.3M) significant expenditure reductions (cuts) are necessary with no additional revenue. We will have at the City Council meeting on Feb 7 five year projections – one with new revenue and one without. It won’t be a detailed budget document but it will show the impact on personnel and services.

The short answer to the inquiry is virtually everything we do in the general fund will be impacted. The largest expenditures are in public safety – police, fire and building/code enforcement and most of that is personnel.

That’s where the money is. We have already reduced staffing by one third over the last ten years from 139 to 93. Those reductions have been across the board, including police, fire, DPS and Administration. Even City Council had been reduced from 11 to 7 in 1995. Some services such as Clerk, elections, Assessing for example are mandated by law and can’t be eliminated. And they already have been reduced to two persons in the Clerk’s office and contracting out the assessor. Other functions such as the Building Inspection, Rental Inspection and Parking Enforcement generate their own revenue and elimination of those activities would eliminate the activity would achieve little if any net savings. Some items such as buildings and parks maintenance are already near non-existent. The solid waste operations (Trash, Recycling and compost) are funded out of separate dedicated millage. But this fund has an ongoing deficit that been supported by an additional $300K transferred from other sources. The loss of the ability to maintain that subsidy, would cause a reduction and/or elimination of these services .The streets are funded by an allocation from the state of the gas tax which has been shrinking every year and already has caused reductions in some of the items mentioned in the email. Road funding is a big topic of the governor and the legislature. Increased funding and a new distribution formula is being contemplated. The new formula could be to our benefit or our detriment. We are watching that one closely with our folks in Lansing. As an aside most of the DPS employees are paid out of the solid waste or Major or Local Street funds – not the general fund.

An early estimate of staffing reductions from Ed estimated a 14-17 person reduction the first year and more following out of approximately 73 GF employees.

Existing employees (FTE) in the GF

12.03 City Hall Administration, (City manager, Finances, Human Resources, City Clerk, Planning)
35 Police
19.5 Fire
3.95 Building Inspection/Code Enforcement
2 Parks and DPS
72.48 TOTAL

Hope that’s not too confusing.

Also, I forgot to mention that two of our police officers are funded through a COPS grant (Other People’s Money) and it runs out next year (FY 2012-13) – making the reduction of two police positions produce no net savings to our general fund.

PAUL SCHREIBER, Mayor:
In order to answer the specifics listed in the original email, city council must pass a budget. City council will consider a five-year budget on February 7. According to the city charter, city council must be pass the annual detailed budget ordinance by June 30. Specifics of services lost will become clearer as the budget is fleshed out…

Property taxes are no longer a stable source of revenue. Even if property values shot up, Prop A and Headlee would keep revenues down. A city income tax would boost and diversify revenues.

As an example, without a revenue boost the city estimates that 41 general fund employees would be cut by 2017. The city currently employs 20 in the fire department and 34 in the police department out of 73 general fund employees. The other 19 employees administer clerk, finance, planning and zoning, treasury and others. It’s hard to imagine how city services could be delivered by cutting 41 of these employees or any other combination of cuts to balance the budget. That’s why I support the city income tax and the Water Street bond millage.

RICHARD MURPHY, former City Planner:
It sounds like the questioner is interested in qualitative changes, too.

One that I’ll call out (predictably) is the planning & economic development function, which can be seen as the piece of the city government dedicated to enabling and helping good stuff to happen (developers building things, businesses moving in, attracting residents) as opposed to meeting state mandates (clerk, assessing, etc) or preventing bad things from happening (public safety).

Check out this aptly-named article on Ferndale’s Valentine Vodka micro-distillery, “What does it mean to be business-friendly?” For a startup or other small business, “get out of the way” is *not* the highest and best thing that the city can do for them: they need and want help from city staff to find appropriate buildings, interface with resources (whether incentive programs, networking, etc.), or navigating higher-level regulatory processes (city planning staff spends a lot of time helping businesses deal with the county and state). A city that does not have somebody on staff to play that role, to handhold and advocate for developers and businesses, will lose out to communities that can provide that service.

Benton Harbor and Pontiac are the counter-examples, of cities that can’t provide that: both have eliminated their planning & development staff, and thus lack anyone for a new business or developer to talk to for help, advice, and support. As a result, some developers won’t even try, or will give up when they can’t get that support. (And this is what I have been told by developers who have done work in those cities in the past, not just within my echo chamber.)

So, what do you make of all that? And, if I may ask, are you more inclined, or less inclined to vote “yes” for the local income tax as a result of having read through it? Or, are you too busy putting your house on the market, in hopes of selling it before we fall into the abyss, to give the vote much thought?