By Jon Wiener
City council members reviewed staff projections of a $9 million budget surplus Tuesday night. Then they tried to figure out new ways to spend it.
The council’s annual goal-setting workshop followed city manager Kevin Duggan’s mid-year budget report at a special meeting at the interim senior center.
“The news mid-year is better than it has been in several years,” said Duggan. “Revenues have finally begun to recover.”
A million dollars each in unexpected revenue from property and sales taxes are driving what city staff predicts will be the highest one-year revenue amount since the peak of the dot-com market five years ago. The jump in revenues includes a projected $2.4 million increase in developer fees. The city also expects to save more than $4 million from employee positions that remain unfilled.
Duggan said the numbers were promising, but cautioned council members that much of it would need to be set aside to account for growing retiree health costs and unpaid sick leave and vacation that workers accrue over the course of the year.
“There’s going to be a lot of call of this money,” said Duggan. “We don’t have enough resources to do everything we want to do.”
That served as the segue into the goal-setting portion of the meeting, an arcane but important annual procedure in which council members lobby their colleagues to support any number of potential new projects. Last year’s session gave birth to the master planning process for Cuesta Park Annex, a customer satisfaction survey and several other initiatives.
This year, council members had six votes to distribute among 22 different potential goals, listed on large sheets of butcher paper. The one that drew the most support was searching for a way to alleviate pressure on the city’s planning department in hopes of speeding the approval process for new housing developments.
The city currently has 2,700 housing units in the pipeline, and more applications roll in every week.
“We may be losing a good opportunity because we don’t have a good strategy,” said council member Mike Kasperzak, who voted for the item, as did all of his colleagues, by putting a sticker next to it.
Council member Laura Macias earned four votes for her proposal to begin the process of updating the city’s general plan, though her proposal for a smart-growth initiative did not fare so well.
“If we’re going to be building, whatever the density, we should do it in a way that increases and doesn’t decrease the quality of life for our residents,” said Macias.
Council member Greg Perry’s proposal to create a fund dedicated to purchasing new land for park space also earned four votes. The other top vote-getter was a staff proposal to build additional connections to the Stevens Creek Trail on the south side of El Camino Real.
E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener
