May 8, 2008

Pyle holds D10 budget meeting

By Carol Rosen
Editor

After several years of minimal attendance at community budget meetings, District 10 Councilmember Nancy Pyle changed the time and venue of her annual budget meeting hoping to entice more residents to attend.

The council member hoped a few extras would bring more people to the budget meeting, which was held at the Almaden Community Center on Wednes-day, May 7, after the Almaden Times went to press, instead of on a Saturday morning. Her staff estimated that at the least 30 and possibly as many as 100 could attend the meeting. Besides presentation of a survey of more than 300 people, the majority of whom--69 percent--live in Almaden, Mayor Chuck Reed and City Manager Debra Figone were there to explain the budgeting process and ask for further responses from area citizens.

The survey was e-mailed to 5,000 residents and local papers encouraged everyone to take the survey on the Web site. There were 307 responses, which will be used by city staff when setting the 2008-09 budget. The response number is pretty typical of survey response.

While the majority of respondents felt the quality of life in San Jose is about the same as two years ago, they also felt the city gave too little funding to code enforcement, street cleaning, park maintenance and recruiting businesses to San Jose, and too much funding given to the fire department, garbage and arts support.

Nearly 40 percent think the city should reduce services to avoid raising fees and taxes, with just over 20 percent suggesting that fees/taxes be raised and about 17 percent who want both fees and taxes raised to maintain or increase current services. Of those responding, 39 percent want police and fire services to have the highest priority for funding, followed by 36 percent for street maintenance, 15 percent to attract businesses and less than 5 percent each for libraries, park maintenance and recreation.

Given choices for the city to close the gap between revenue and expenses, 74.3 percent urged the city to change the way it provides services to reduce costs. The majority voted to increase hotel room taxes, adjust business license taxes and increase existing real estate transfer tax. They oppose the parcel tax dedicated to safety and other critical services and increasing the sales tax, the existing utility tax and creating community facilities districts.

Among the responses to close the gap through administrative functions, residents suggested increasing civilian positions in police and fire departments, contracting out services, selling under-used city property and lowering entry-level salaries. They oppose reducing police and fire staffing.

They also suggested cuts in city funding to nonprofit community based organizations, reducing support staff for the police department, reducing pay increases for city employees, reducing library hours by one day per week and reducing staff for the city attorney, city clerk, city manager and independent police auditor. In addition, they oppose reducing police staff working on property crimes, reducing street maintenance, reducing school crossing guards and eliminating crime prevention programs.