Once again, an anonymous “we” tells us that “they” want to be “respectful of everyone’s time—yours, the council’s and the staff’s” by combining council meetings to one per month for April and May.
I don’t know if council members agreed or if this was decided only by the city manager (and mayor?). It is well known that the city manager has a forecast of topics for upcoming meetings, but continuing a practice of her predecessors, refuses to publish that rolling list.
So I cannot judge what cancelling meetings when there are “only a few items to discuss” might mean for public education and engagement.
Given the likely extreme stresses on our city budget resulting from reductions in county and state budgets due to federal and economic impacts, this is exactly the wrong time to not engage with our residents on what is important to us and what we can do as a community to lessen the impact from outside forces.
The city has a two-year budget cycle and this May and June is the time to consider funding priorities for year two.
Please ask your council member for real transparency and public engagement for this critical time.
Doug Muirhead
Morgan Hill
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Doug, isn’t a deficit of ~$5M per year, nearly 10% of total General Fund revenue, ‘extreme’ enough?
Extreme enough to not just say oh we can figure out what to do about that ‘later’?!
TO BE CLEAR the City’s five-year forecast, projecting gaping budget deficits, that the last two-year budget was based on WAS in ‘extreme stress’ LONG BEFORE anything to with county, state or federal reductions!!
Those stresses were a result of one simple fact: the City’s General Fund expenditures, including skyrocketing wage, benefits and pension costs especially for senior staff, exceed revenues and the ONLY ‘patch’ given any serious consideration is to ask residents to approve new taxes.
The reason the Staff doesn’t want to engage with the public is because they do know selling new Tax Measures will be difficult- especially as their constituents look around and see what is happening. They need to Just Make Up
a story along the lines you implied- the ‘extreme stresses’ are all because of things those responsible for running our local government supposedly had no control over.
ANY story that places the vast majority of blame for the extreme stresses the City budget faces outside of those who will be asking for more of our money so they can keep ‘figuring it out later’ quickly falls apart upon examination of the budget and other decisions that have been made.
When the goal is to keep the status quo, transparency is something to avoid at all costs.