Saratoga News

News

City council spreads money around at a special meeting

By Jason Sweeney

The Saratoga City Council doled out some extra cash at a special meeting on July 6 at the Saratoga Senior Center. The money came from one-time payments from the state of California and from the Association of Bay Area Governments.

Because of the passage of Proposition 1A in November 2004, the state of California was forced to repay money it had taken from local governments. Saratoga also received a one-time payment from ABAG for reimbursement for statutory disability payments. That meant the city had an extra $1,213,500 in its coffers not allocated in the budget for this fiscal year.

Of that unallocated money, $516,900 came from a vehicle license fee reimbursement last year from the state. Another $520,200 came from state repayments of "take-away" money. The payment from ABAG amounted to $176,400.

"When you get an unexpected windfall of funds, the first thing you do in terms of best practices is to refund your reserves," City Manager Dave Anderson said. "and that's what the council decided to do. The economic uncertainty fund is now back up to full strength. They were able to do that and balance the budget."

The council put $260,100 from the one-time payments into the city's Reserve for Economic Uncertainty, bringing the total amount in that fund to $1.5 million. Another $62,500 was put into the city's Retirees Medical Benefit Account. That left $890,900 still unallocated.

"The first priority was to pay back the economic uncertainty fund," Mayor Norman Kline said. "That's just good practice. When the economy is down, that fund is to smooth out the downturn."

Of the unallocated $890,900, the council decided to dole out $90,900 to outside agencies, and place the remaining $800,000 in the Capital Improvement Projects fund.

Of the $90,900 that went to outside agencies, public access station KSAR received $19,400 for video-related services, such as converting videotapes to DVD and streaming video for the city's website. The Saratoga Chamber of Commerce received $18,400 to support Celebrate Saratoga!, and also for city maps to be supplied to city hall. The Saratoga Area Senior Coordinating Council received $48,600 for a storage shed, computers and software, and for operational funds. The Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley received $4,500 to secure the center's birdcages from the West Nile virus.

"We had cut funding to most of these groups over the last several years in various ways," Kline said. "We added up the requests from the various groups, and they were all pretty good projects. The rule was that we wanted to give them funding for one-time expenses and not ongoing expenses."

The council will decide how to allocate money in the CIP fund at its regular meeting on July 19. Unlike money given to outside agencies, Anderson said money in the CIP fund generally goes to pay for physical improvements to the city. This can include such things as purchasing land for open space, improvements to city-owned buildings such as those on the North Campus, constructing a new building for Hakone Gardens or such projects as the Gateway Project on Prospect and Saratoga-Sunnyvale roads.

Kline said he would like the council to decide at its July 19 meeting to put a significant amount of the undesignated CIP money to repairing Saratoga's roads. "It's not glamorous. There's no one jumping up and down for it. But it's something that needs to be done."

Kline said it's possible the council would put some of the CIP money to projects at Hakone Gardens and to repairs at the North Campus.

Another windfall the city has been eyeing is a repayment of Tax Equity Allocation funds from Santa Clara County. If Assembly Bill 117 passes in Sacramento, the city of Saratoga would see an annual TEA payment of $1,040,000 to its general fund. However, a decision on AB 117 has been delayed until the fall. According to Kline, political dynamics have changed since the June 6 elections, making the bill a tougher sell, although he still hopes to see it pass.