Santa Rosa City Council seeks to tweak Measure O

Eleven years after voters approved Measure O, Santa Rosa may ask voters to change a provision in the 20-year public safety sales tax that requires ever- larger public safety budgets.

The City Council late Tuesday, after a robust debate, accepted the finding of a subcommittee that recommended asking voters to tweak the measure in a way that would cap police, fire and gang prevention budgets at current levels.

Vice Mayor Chris Coursey said the council’s financial subcommittee sought a “fair, reasonable and equitable” solution to a flaw in the measure’s language that had the unintended consequence of hiking public safety budgets even when city revenue was falling. He stressed the move was “not an attack on Measure O and not an attack on public safety.”

“What this is is an attempt to fix a problem that’s been acknowledged by at least the last two councils,” said Coursey, who sits on the committee and campaigned last year in part on reforming Measure O.

In 2004, following a spate of gang violence, Santa Rosa voters overwhelmingly approved a 20-year sales tax measure aimed at boosting public safety in the city. The tax raises about $9 million a year for police, fire and gang prevention services.

But a provision in the measure aimed at ensuring the revenue was used to enhance services has caused fiscal headaches for the city. To prevent future city leaders from tapping the new tax revenue to fund existing services, the measure required public safety budgets to meet a baseline level that increased every year by inflation.

That seemed reasonable at the time, especially since with six votes the council could decide to go below that baseline. But even when the council did so, the baseline continued to go up year after year, making it harder for the city to play catch-up.

The result: Public safety budgets increased as a percentage of the city general fund from 55 percent in 2005 to more than 60 percent following the recession.

Instead of pegging the baseline budgets to inflation as happens today, the council agreed it would be more equitable to cap public safety funding at its current level of 58 percent of the general fund for future years.

“This is intended to cap the growth of the public safety budgets at a reasonable and sustainable level while maintaining core services,” Chief Financial Officer Debbi Lauchner explained.

If the council moves forward, voters would be asked if they want the new baseline to be set at 34.3 percent of the general fund for police, 23.7 percent for fire and 0.4 percent for gang prevention.

But that proposed solution, and indeed the notion that there was even a problem, immediately came under fire from the council’s two retired police officers.

Retired city police Chief Tom Schwedhelm and retired Sgt. Ernesto Olivares both objected to the move. Olivares said he wasn’t hearing from constituents that there was a issue.

“My email’s working. I have no letters, I have received no phone calls related to this, and typically we do,” Olivares said.

He questioned why the committee even took up the issue, pressing Coursey about his explanation that the issue came up because of “conversations that are happening in the community” about this issue.

“I want to see where that came from. Is it one person, two people, three people, five people?” Olivares said. “There is this impression that we have this big swell of community members talking about it, and I’m not seeing it.”

Schwedhelm noted that if the baseline had been pegged to the general fund from the beginning, public safety departments would have taken a bigger hit than they did during the recession.

But that’s exactly what city staff said should be happening in a recession - all city departments should be sharing that pain more equitably, instead of an “automatic accelerator” for certain departments. The funding of public safety departments “will go up and down as the budget goes up and down,” Lauchner said.

“It is redefining the baseline so it more accurately reflects and trends with the economics of the community, and it ensures equal treatment for all of our programs funded with the general fund,” she said.

Councilwoman Julie Combs said the automatic annual adjustment upward in the public safety budgets created a pattern in which public safety benefited at the expense of other city departments.

“We had a kind of cannibalization going on with our city as long as our economy was in recession,” Combs said. While public safety staffing is up, some departments have yet to recover, she noted.

The parks and recreation department had the equivalent of 132.6 full-time positions in 2008 and today has 93. Economic development had 74 and now has 60. Meanwhile, the fire department had the equivalent of 143.75 full-time positions in 2008 and now has 147.75.

“I used to say the parks department was anorexic, but I think they were eaten,” Combs quipped.

Ultimately, the council agreed to authorize City Manager Sean McGlynn to spend $130,000 to hire an attorney specializing in election law, a pollster to conduct research, and a public outreach team to prepare information if the council - after reviewing the polling data - decides to move forward.

The vote was 5-2, with Olivares and Schwedhelm dissenting.

But even some supporters had issues with the move.

Erin Carlstrom asked several questions that suggested she didn’t feel the outreach by the financial subcommittee had been sufficient. She asked how the agenda of the meetings were set, who was invited to the meetings and whether employee or community groups were invited.

She also said she was disappointed to hear that McGlynn had been researching pollsters and others before the council gave its stamp of approval. He said he had not spent any money yet and was merely trying to line up professionals to help the council act quickly if it decided to proceed.

Coursey bristled at Olivares’ suggestion that he was unaware Measure O was an issue. Coursey pointed out it came up in 2012, when the city amended its charter, and the City Council considered but ultimately declined to put the issue on the ballot because of time constraints.

“To suggest this is … one or two people deciding it’s a problem is rewriting history here, because it was recognized by the past council as a problem,” Coursey said.

Combs noted that she made fixing Measure O a campaign issue when she was running for council nearly four years ago.

Mayor John Sawyer initially was leaning against changing the language in Measure O, which he acknowledged has a funding mechanism that is “a little mysterious” to most people. But he said he came to feel that a tweak to the baseline language could bring some parity to other city departments. Before he did so, however, Sawyer said he needed to “take the temperature of the electorate.”

Coursey stressed that the polling would help the council make good decisions in the future.

“If the answer is ‘Leave it alone,’ I wouldn’t think we’re going to go to the ballot with this,” Coursey said.

You can reach Staff Writer ?Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or ?kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include the correct percentages for public safety budgets, when made up 55 percent of the general fund in 2005 and rose to over 60 percent in 2011.