Palo Alto eyes bond to fix aged infrastructure

Infrastructure repairs and maintenance should be a part of our city budget every single year, and not require a huge bail-out in catch-up mode. This is an integral part of managing a city, a business, or a household. I encourage our city managers and elected officials to make this a higher priority as a routine and necessary expense.

I would support a bond that was paid for out of the general fund budget. This funding would be done by cutting:

- Some City Manager's office staff (do we really need 1 assistant city maanger, 2 assistant to the city manager, and a deputy city manager)?

- Make programs like the Children's theater self supporting ($1.3 million savings right there)

- Cut the management overhead so that the ratio of managers to workers is at most 1 manager/8 workers.

- Reduce the non-public safety fleet of cars

- Reform the pension benefit for new hires.

Plenty of money to pay for the infrastructure bond, without going to the voters.

Or maybe we should have a admendment to the charter mandating 10% of the general fund go towards infrasturcture projects.

More bonds. I just can't afford this any more. Why did we not vote this before going all out on outlandish libraries??

Welcome to Palo Alto, Put your hands in the air this is a stick up!

Tell Joe the joke as he walks the streets...

A Blue Ribbon Task Force for infrastructure repairs is dumb. Everyone will lobby hard for repairs in their neighborhood so if a neighborhood is not represented on the Task Force it'll be out of luck.

It is the Staffs job to decide what needs to be done and where. Instead of passing it off onto a Blue Ribbon Task Force that will only argue over location of jobs.

The City should make the decisions, it's their job, quit passing the buck.

Who are the 6 volunteers, and what are their interests?

yea! another blue ribbon committee added on top of the multiple ongoing blue ribbon committees for every major and minor project in palo alto. maybe instead of maintaining the city manager job, council should hire consultants to fill each blue ribbon committee deemed necessary to answer each and every financial or bureaucratic decision and provide direction to move the city forward. perhaps council can inform us how much this specilized team of professionals slated for the blue ribbon committe will cost and who will determine that committee members are qualified and will proceed with no biased opinions so as not to disqualify any decision or discredit their qualifications. how unfortunate for taxpayers that the top management job in the city was created and funded to make educated decisions on city matters and give direction to city council and now is being outsourced while still paying an annual salary for this top level position.

I would support an infrastructure bond, but only if the City gets its fiscal house in order first. Unfortunately, the odds of that happening is practically nil.

As a 36 year employee that just retired, I remember that the infrastructure was in need of re-placing over 25 years ago.
We warned the city management time and time again about this fact, but they didn't take action. Same old Palo Alto.
The small city I live in has been saving for years and now they just built 3 new fire stations, a new city hall and a new huge library.

This Task force is going to accomplish nothing !!!

Problem is with PENSION PLANS.

Here is my suggestion ...

STOP THIS NONSENSE of transferring money from Utilities to General Fund. File for bankruptcy - ERASE THE PENSION PLANS ....

Start OVER...

(This is the only sane thing to do)

This is how you boil a frog. A frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water. So you put him in a pot of warm water, then raise the temperature incrementally.

Thus you get taxpayers to consider each element of a city's budget in isolation. After all, each element looks worthy. Schools! Library! Police! Fire! All wonderful, deserving of our support.

Families get into the red the same way. Rarely does just one thing break the bank. It's all of them put together. Because at the end of the day they're paid for out of the same pot: our income (plus, if we really screw up, our assets).

So how about a referendum on the budget as a whole? Well, cities don't like that. It smacks of having to live within Proposition 13's severe constraints.

And bonds and parcel taxes work. Palo Altans have voted for both, over and over. So despite all the naysayers on this comment thread, odds are such a bond will pass.

And the pension time bomb, and the need to share fire department services with neighboring cities and/or the county, and the idea of living up to the spirit of Prop. 13 instead of constantly trying to evade it, can all be put off another year.

Maybe.

To pass any bond, the City will have to demonstrate:

Common Sense
Fiscal Responsibility

Even something as simple as the order of street related repairs does not happen. Rip a street up once, replace everything that need replacing/repair. Repave the street. PA method is rip it up once for every utility, never really repair the street.

The only sensible thing to do about *maintenance* is pay as you go. The big ticket projects (e.g. new police station) should be viewed separately. But, as City Employee pointed out -- you can actually save as you go, too, and build a firehouse or library without a bond issue.

City Employee - where do you live now? Perhaps Palo Alto could learn something from its budget process.

To 'Palo Alto Mom' -

You might want to check your facts before you make inaccuarate statements. The coordinated approach to street repairs is exactly what the City DOES do, and has for the past 4 years or so. Check out the work completed in the SOFA area, the work underway in the College Terrace area, and the work beginning in the Crescent Park area. All have the comprehensive utility work done first and the paving subsequently over a period of two years or so. Ironically enough, some residents then complain that the work is to concentrated, intense, and intrusive.

It would be nice if those who criticize at least know what they are talking about, but I guess that's too much to hope for........

You have a 9-member city council, that at one o-clock in the morning, derails recommendations provided them by expert residents that worked on your projects for years, now they want citizens to figure out how to solve your problems and then pay for it?

What have your representatives been doing with all the money that's come in over the years?

Council supports more remodeling on the first floor of City Hall and topping it off, they want YOU to pay for your own sidewalk repairs, while city staff micromanages how to do it.

Palo Alto is amusing. I watch it because we almost moved there. I keep telling you to move to Los Altos Hills, where it's sane. Palo Alto is no longer the community it once was.

Civic Engagement was your council's 'Top Priority' for two years, yet none of them (including your new highly paid City Manager) ever knew what it was. Do you not find that troubling?

It's the old California political approach to punt decisions to someone else so they don't have to make hard decisions so they can continue to get the votes and donations to their campaigns.

Californians are such tools.