Check It Out

If you're not sure your voter registration is correct, you can now check it out online. Just go to the website and fill out the form.

Deadlines

October 14th is the last day you can register to vote in the November 4th General Election. There are 83 legislatively mandated deadlines around this election, so do the election's office a favor and get your card in early. If you've moved since the last election you need to let the county election office know, since they will not forward your ballot. In fact, they can inactivate your registration if a ballot is returned by the post office.

Learning From History

A question I'm frequently asked is, "How did we get into this fiscal mess in the first place?" In a state that requires balanced budgets, how could we dig a hole in our general fund so deep that it's still around after a decade? The question is more than academic. While we are almost out of the hole, we need to understand how we got into it so we don't make the same mistakes again.

The piece of Oregon budget law which everyone can quote is that a budget must balance. You can't submit a budget document where the resources (revenue) don't match the expenditures. But after looking at audit reports going back more than a decade, I can show you several ways you can get in trouble while still submitting a balanced budget:

1. Fall short on revenues, but continue spending as planned.
2. Spend more than is budgeted.
3. Overestimate a fund starting balance, then spend everything in the fund including the starting balance.
   
4. Spend grant money that doesn't come in.
5. Operate with balances near zero, without contingency funds for legitimate emergencies.
   
6. Budget ongoing yearly expenses (like payroll or debt service) that don't have a regular source of revenue (like property tax) to cover them in future years.

It is easy to be smug and conclude that you'd have to be pretty careless to do any of these things, but in the real world it's not always so obvious. The budget is a very complex document (a spreadsheet of over 50 pages), and we frequently don't get critical pieces of information (like ending balances from the previous year) until long after we've made decisions where that information was needed. And since most people don't exactly enjoy the budget process, it's easy to ignore it outside of the annual budget season. Unfortunately by the time you're working on the next year's budget it's far too late to adjust course for the previous year.

Last year I proposed a new set of budgeting rules to keep us from making these mistakes. They prohibit the practices that caused the deficit in the first place, and increase the planning horizon so we are working with better information when we prepare the budget. They also mandate greater transparency in budgeting, so it's easier for the council and citizens to provide oversight. Here are some examples:

• Every fund needs a contingency (10% in the general fund). We're not done with our "deficit reduction plan" until we have some buffers in our critical funds.
  
• Recurring expenses like payroll must be covered by recurring revenues like property taxes, not by drawing down reserves.
• Payroll and tax revenues must be forecast three years out, so we don't go down a path of adding staff that we can't afford past the current year.
• All capital equipment (fire trucks, police cars, etc.) need to be on a replacement plan so we know several years in advance how much money we'll need to keep the fleet operating.
• Transfers between funds need to be clearly identified so we can be sure actual expenditures match the plan the council and budget committee have agreed to.
  

None of this is a substitute for careful, timely oversight. We've scheduled a mid-year tune-up to be sure the predictions we made back in June still hold in October. I'm convinced that the budget committee and the city council take their role in getting our finances back in shape very seriously, but you have a role too. Pay attention and ask questions. Every time you ask a question you remind us to take another look. That look might flush out a problem while there's still time to fix it. The more people who are asking questions about the city's finances, the more likely we are to maintain the discipline to keep ourselves out of trouble.

What's Up?

One of the most common questions I'm asked is,"what going on now in city council?" Here's a quick list of issues we've discussed in the past few months:

• Budget
• Water and sewer major infrastructure projects
  
• Revenue sources (ie. taxes and fees)
• Waterfront Park
• Annexations
• Fire Dept. building/ equipment bond measure
  
• Urban Growth Boundary expansion
• Urban renewal district for the waterfront
• affordable housing
• downtown parking (and heights parking too!)
• building code review

I guess I have plenty of topics to talk about in future posts. But before we get too serious, here's a picture I took at last week's opening of our new waterfront park. Kids, dogs-- how can you resist?

Setting the Tone

As I announced my candidacy for mayor of Hood River this week I've been asked the "why?" question more than a few times. This blog should help answer it. (And no, this isn't my stepping stone to the vice-presidency.) If you really are interested in Hood River politics you can also check out my blog from my city council run two years ago.

Most people only have a vague idea of what our mayor does, so that's a good place to start. Our City Charter says the mayor is the seventh member of the city council, with a few special roles:

• the mayor chairs council meetings
• the mayor can add items to the agenda (other council member can do this too, but require a vote)
• the mayor officially signs ordinances and proclamations (but only with agreement of council, and without veto power)

A common misconception is that the mayor breaks ties. Our charter requires 4 votes for any motion to pass no matter how many are present, instead of the normal "majority of those present" rule. This means that the only tie the mayor breaks is a 3-3 tie, since the mayor's vote can make the 4th. A 2-2 tie can't be broken.

The mayor, like the rest of council, is an unpaid volunteer. There are of course the ceremonial ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings, but I hope I've made the point that the money and power are not a big reason to be mayor under our charter.

There is just one thing that I can do as mayor that I can't do as a council member, but it's a big one to me. The mayor sets the tone for public involvement. While Oregon law requires most proceedings of government to be open to the public, there is a big difference between being allowed to attend a meeting and being invited to participate in charting the course of the city. I want the public to play a more active role in running the city. I'll just talk about one example now: we've all been working very hard for several years to restore our city's fiscal health. In the next two years, we will have to make fundamental decisions about what city services to fund, and how to fund them. I'll bore you with plenty of details later, but for now I want to talk about how we'll make those decisions.

In broad strokes the problem is that city revenues (taxes and fees) grow with inflation and new development at a slower rate than our major expense, which is payroll. This means that to balance our budget we can increase taxes or fees, add new taxes or fees, decrease services to cut expenses, or some combination of all three. Do you have an opinion on this? Maybe not in the abstract, but as soon as we start talking about specific new fees or specific service cuts, everyone wants to be part of the discussion-- and they should.

Here are the steps I see:

1. educate. We can't just talk about elements of this in isolation. The council and the public need to understand how taxes and fees are tied to services, and what trade-offs can be considered. Example: Don't talk about whether a gas tax is a "good idea", but whether a gas tax should be considered to replace to $150,000 we're losing in federal funding for road repairs.
   
2. discuss. No one has a monopoly on good ideas. We need to hear ideas from all quarters. My simple rule for running a discussion is to allow people to talk until things start getting repetitive, then it's time to move on.
   
3. decide. We can choose our course as a community. Everyone won't agree, but we need to move forward with a plan that best reflects the needs of our city.