Opponents of Mayor David Coss’ $30 million bond proposal say it won’t create jobs.
Mayor David Coss spent most of his Oct. 19 State of the City address pushing a $30 million bond proposal slated to go before voters in March’s city elections. Coss bills it as the “Opportunity and Quality of Life Bond,” which encompasses 10 city projects including broadband infrastructure, solar energy investment and public park improvements.
“Now is the time to prepare and plan for the infrastructure that we need for a strong economy in the 21st century,” Coss told a standing-room crowd during the speech at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center.
Proponents of the bond say the city isn’t getting the investment it needs from state or federal government. City Councilor Carmichael Dominguez, who chairs the Public Works Committee, has taken the lead in helping Coss flesh out the details of the general obligation bond.
“Santa Fe is a special place,” Dominguez tells SFR. “Part of the reason it’s special is because we’ve invested in it for many, many years.”
But the proposal—which, if approved, would raise property taxes by approximately $70 annually for owners of $300,000 homes—is controversial.
Rick Martinez, vice president of the Santa Fe Neighborhood Network, is vocal about his doubts.
“There’s not one full-time job in this packet here,” Martinez tells SFR, pointing to a hard copy of the bond proposal. “There’s a lot of things in there that we don’t really need right now.”
One item “not even worth discussing,” Martinez says, is the significant amount of money ($5 million, until the city Public Works Committee voted Oct. 24 to reduce it to $3 million) allocated for a “multimodal transit center” in the Railyard.
“The whole Railyard master plan they came up with a few years ago doesn’t even represent what it turned out to be,” Martinez says. “Now they want us to stick another $5 million in there.”
Martinez is also concerned about the projects’ broad nature, and says the $3 million earmarked for public park improvements might overlap with projects originally funded by a $30 million bond approved in 2008.
Dominguez says he’s working on figuring out “how many more construction jobs would be created” by the proposal, which he says doesn’t overlap with the 2008 bond. He’s trying to come up with a process to make sure the projects will only be awarded to local contractors.
Coss says the bond items will improve the city’s quality of life. He says $2 million in broadband investment would create three central nodes—at the Railyard, near Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and near the Santa Fe Business Incubator on Airport Road—to help small businesses afford better connections [news, June 22: “Wire-less”].
Still, some criticize the process by which the bond projects were selected.
Former City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer, who’s active in the League of Women Voters of Santa Fe County, says the mayor’s office didn’t post a detailed list of the projects online until a month after Coss began promoting it.
“How much public discussion has taken place about these things?” Heldmeyer wonders. “That’s something the mayor and supporters of the bill need to explain.”
Coss says the projects derive from his experience “in the last six years of working with the community.”
“It’s not like I made these things up,” he says.
Heldmeyer also says the city often moves money around. She remembers years ago when voters improved a gross receipts tax increase for public transportation. The city council ended up diverting some of the money to summer youth and senior programs.
“In order to get the public to vote on something, [politicians] often overstate what it’s going to be used for,” Heldmeyer says.
City Councilor Matthew Ortiz, who chairs the Finance Committee, says his group has since asked the mayor’s staff for a breakdown of the dollar figures attached to each project.
And while Santa Fe is home to some of the lowest property taxes in the state [Indicators, July 6: “Private Property”], some say raising them will hurt the city’s middle- and low-income property owners.
City Councilor Miguel Chavez, who opposed a push to increase property taxes to balance the city budget earlier this year, says the proposed increases would have far-reaching effects.
“We’re going to straddle citizens on this for 20 years and hope this is going to work,” Chavez tells SFR.
Breakdown of the city bond proposal:
I was thrilled to vote in favor of the Community College bond. No way I would vote for this.
1. City council made a $250,000 per year gift to Peso Chavez to rehire his security company. That would service about $4 million dollars in debt all by itself.
2. Generally Unacceptable Accounting Practices by the city. The City Attorney is on record that operation and maintenance expenses are the same as a capital expenditure. Basically, anything goes. anything short of getting put in Federal prison is OK according to the City's legal-eagle.
3. Huge, 10% local preference on bids. Why don't they just legalize graft and explicitly direct the bids to their favorite asphalt company? $3million to politically connected people because they rent an office in town. Isn't that a little rich?
4. As Councilwoman Heldmeyer mentioned, they might just divert the money to other uses. Outside of city government, this is called "embezzlement"
There are two bond offerings totaling $50M that are proposed. Neither will create private sector jobs that continue past the construction phase or are likely to tangibly affect how Santa Fe looks to a private sector enterprise as a place to do business or expand.
On the other hand, creation of new parks will require more maintenance expense for the city in addition to increased debt service costs. More costly government and more debt. With a private sector economy unlikely to recover in the near future, this may not be a really good idea.
I have to ask also where the City stands on being able to repay existing debt and how well funded its employee retirement plan(s) currently are. Most cities in the US are way underfunded and hide it by using very high assumed rates of return on investments, such as 8% or more, often double what was used in the private sector when defined benefit plans were prevalent, and why private sector companies phased them out...the funding curve was too steep.
I could not locate financials for SF, but didn't try too hard. The retirement benefit plan assumptions should be in the footnotes.
Without a booming private sector, which is where government gets all its funding, more debt and spending on "nice to have" projects is unlikely to end well. Cities like Vallejo CA have gone bankrupt, and more are following.
If the city will not use non-union contractors or has prevailing wage agreements, it is likely that the highest wage for any profession will be paid for the work, which means the least work accomplished for every dollar spent. In hard times, taxpayer money should spent very carefully.
Why is SF getting into the broadband communications and solar power industries with taxpayer money? Because no private sector enterprise can make it work economically? And so Coss wants the taxpayer to sign up to his visions? Just like Obama and Solyndra? Does Coss have any relevant exposure to those businesses, or is this another amateur entrepreneur playing with other people's money?
There is a lot I don't know about how Coss is setting priorities here, and who he is.
The mayor of my little town sold residential real estate for a living and she thinks now she understands how tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money should be spent to create "jobs" in industrial settings.
We have a drought here but the new city library has a large, illuminated water fountain running 24/7 in the half acre of lawn at its front (nice bronze of Mark Twain on a bench with book in hand, too). The city sends me monthly notes with bright ideas about how to conserve water in my yard. I am less impressed with local pols by the day, much less when they want taxpayers to subsidize electricity at 6x the cost of other sources.
I'm sure someone would vote for Coss because of his greenie cred, but is that what taxpayer money should be used for?