Photo illustration by Robert Scheer
Scissors slash a page of Saratoga's budget, illustrating the city's need to make cuts.
By Sarah Lombardo
It was a study in uncertainty at last week's town hall meeting on the budget. Councilmembers were uncertain how residents wanted them to cut the budget, and residents were uncertain what the city was legally able to cut.
In the end, the council agreed to hold two more town hall meetings, one this week and one on Feb. 3, and to direct commissions and staff in the meantime to draw up plans and suggestions for possible cuts.
Residents' suggestions ran the gamut from ending street sweeping and community access television to replacing City Manager Harry Peacock and City Attorney Michael Riback; from cutting high-end city salaries and staff benefits to scrapping whole positions at City Hall.
One thing was certain: Everyone felt they had something at stake. Representatives from the youth commission and from the senior community both defended their causes and urged the council not to make cuts in their areas. Other residents simply asked the council and other residents to remember why they enjoy living in Saratoga when they made budget-cut suggestions.
"What I'm looking for today is the continuation of a safe city," said resident Jack Mallory. "I'd like to be able to continue to say that I am proud of Saratoga, not that Saratoga has cut down the budget to the bone to the point where we can't afford anything."
But no one seemed to think hammering out a new budget to account for the loss of more than $800,000 in utility tax funds and about $700,000 in county-matched tax funds, dependent on the collection of the utility user's tax, would be easy.
"You're going to have to get into some gory details in going through the budget line item by line item," resident Ed Benson told the council, "and a couple of inputs I just want to make are that you shouldn't feel bad about the necessity of cutting a service where we voters can provide that service ourselves. Anything I can do, you don't need to do for me."
Councilmember Jim Shaw appealed to the commissions to prioritize. "One of the things we need to do is ask our commissions to help us do the hard part. I admire that you all are going to defend the areas you are supporting, but you have to lose an arm or a leg, make sacrifices," Shaw said. "I think we have to lay out a program that assumes the worst."
Councilmember Paul Jacobs suggested that everyone try not to think in terms of cuts.
"There's another way of looking at this. I think we need to look at this in terms of long-term," Jacobs said. "Maybe we ought to be talking about tearing down all our assumptions right down to the foundations and starting over. What is it that you want the city to provide? And you start at the foundation and build up."
Many residents told the council that they needed more information on what the city could legally cut, what was mandated and what actually came from the city's general fund before they could offer suggestions or priorities. Mayor Gillian Moran directed the staff and commissions to meet sometime before the meeting on Feb. 3 and to prepare information to be distributed. But, Gillian said, she wanted to make sure that the public stays involved.
"I want to do what is least harmful to the voters. It is not my intention, and I don't think it is the intention of anybody, to make cuts that will show people a thing or two and make them decide that we have to have a tax back again. That's counterproductive," Moran said. "I do think, on the other hand, that we have to get serious."
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, January 15, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.