Our City Council has authorized the expenditure of $250,000 in
consultant fees with the hope of securing an additional $1.9
billion in future redevelopment funding.
Our City Council has authorized the expenditure of $250,000 in consultant fees with the hope of securing an additional $1.9 billion in future redevelopment funding.
At the same time, the City is opening a “conversation” with its citizenry to help decide which City services they would be willing to live without in order to balance the budget.
All the while, the City is dipping into it’s reserve funds to continue it’s current operations.
Looking at those facts in this way does not make me feel comfortable about the future health of this community.
Councilman Sellers says that the Council has been “good stewards” of the current RDA funding.
That may be partially true; first in the sense that that they did base their initial decisions as to what the City should do with that money on a city wide “visioning” process; secondly in that they paid attention to how much capability they could buy for the funding available.
However, as a member of the Parks and Recreation Commission during the time that the Aquatics Center was being built, I can also say that I trusted neither the revenue forecasts from the city staff nor the input that they had from the consultants used on that project.
Consultants are very good at identifying the goals that their clients (city staff) has and to find a way to spin the story so that those goals are achieved.
That should be a warning as we enter into a whole new set of ambitious plans.
It is lunacy to base the City’s financial planning on the need for continuous growth. Current policies encourage the spending of current funds based on a hope for tax revenues from future growth.
That puts the City into the position of encouraging all growth, no matter what the long range consequences might be, for the sole reason that it will increase the tax revenues to the city.
Major obstacles to future growth are both economic and environmental.
On a purely economic basis, the fact that worldwide oil production has peaked while demand is escalating is a reality that this country has not truly begun to face.
The economic dislocation that this can cause needs to be built into future planning. It is a reality that will transform communities as people look to shorten their increasingly expensive commutes, living closer to work.
It is in the best long-term interest of the community to maintain a balance between employment opportunities and the size of the housing supply for those workers.
The second major threat comes from our climate. A majority of Californians, including Morgan Hill residents, depend on stored water supplies and long distance delivery systems to maintain even our current needs.
Were either the water supply or the delivery systems compromised, as might happen in a major earthquake, Silicon Valley, including Morgan Hill would find that all growth comes to a dead halt.
There is little that the City Council can directly do to affect the outcomes The real power lies in other organizations right up to the Federal Government Army Corps of Engineers, the State Bureau of Reclamation, Cal-Fed and our own water district.
While I don’t think much of Bob Cerruti’s solutions, he is right to focus attentions on what our Water District is doing.
They should be spending whatever political capital they have on ensuring that we have protection from a disaster that would take place if the levees of the delta are breached, the delta flooded with sea water and drinkable water for over half of California made undrinkable because we do not have the capability to remove the salt from that much delta water.
Do not think that this is far fetched. Global Warming, for whatever reason, is happening. Sea levels are rising, including in Suisun Bay.
The land in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Rived delta system is subsiding at a rate of 1.8 inches per year just based on the way we are currently removing water without replenishment. The Federal Government has just authorized $40,000,000 for levee repair to apply against a need of billions of dollars. Were there to be a levee failure, the economic shock of that event will undermine whatever need we have for continued growth.
Whatever the City does, it should not require growth just for the sake of building the tax base. It should not force the City to dip further into its reserves to finance ongoing operations. Rather, it should be based on our community having control over its own future as it stands.
Then, future planned, smart growth, integrated with community needs will be a blessing and not a fix to the problems we have brought on ourselves.
As most know, I belong to the Green Party. I switched my registration from the Republican Party to the Greens over the Green values of sustainable economic development and the decentralization of political power back to the community.
I did not see either of the two major parties addressing those issues. Those values are essential if our City Council is to avoid creating a future disaster.
