The Future of Our City: City Council Planning Session

-
This Saturday, January 20th, the San Leandro City Council is holding its annual planning session at the San Leandro Senior Community Center, located at 13909 East 14th Street, from 8:30 a.m. until approximately 2:00 p.m. The meeting will include opportunities for public comments and questions.

 Why is this meeting important? For two reasons: (1) the City Finance Director provides a multi-year forecast on the city budget and (2) the City Council sets goals and priorities for our local government for the coming year and beyond.
If we want to influence what issues our local elected officials should address, Saturday is the time to speak up.

In addition, the budget update is extremely important. Neighboring cities have reported that despite rising revenues they expect to run deficits in the coming years due to continuing increases in pension and retiree health care costs.

San Leandro has been running a budget surplus the past several years. That all may be about to change (or already has changed). Further, it appears that the City has not brought in third parties to comprehensively examine its pension and retiree health care costs since 2013.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Looking Back: Measure B Transformed San Leandro Public Schools

-
Image
Our tax dollars can make a real difference in the lives of our children and prosperity of a community. Twelve years ago San Leandro High School was grossly overcrowded leading to discipline problems and undermining academic performance, no theater in the school district existed for student performances, and many restrooms at schools were in such poor condition that the students would not use them. That all changed in August 2006 when the School Board voted to place Measure  B on the ballot. The largest school construction bond in San Leandro’s history, Measure B received overwhelming support and led to the physical transformation of San Leandro public school (combined with the passage of two subsequent bond measures and one earlier measure). With better public schools, San Leandro has become a more desirable city to live, helping attract and retain families who previously would have never moved to San Leandro or moved away when the children were in middle school. Here is a
Read more

How Juan Gonzalez won the San Leandro Mayor's office at the end of the counting of votes

-
Image
On November 18, 2022, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters released the vote count for nearly all votes cast in the November 2022 general election. After being behind for the entire vote count, Juan Gonzalez effectively won the race.  How did this happen? First, from election night through 11/17, the Registrar had reported a total of 13,746 first choice ballots in the Mayor's race. On 11/18, the number of votes reported increased by 6,436 to 20,185 total votes. That was a nearly 47% jump in the reported votes. Another way of looking at the data is that prior to 11/18, all previous vote counts released by the Registrar did not include roughly one-third of the votes that were cast in the race. Second, Gonzalez  decisively took the lead in the the first choice ballots that were released by the Registrar on 11/18. Gonzalez took these votes by 39% to 33% margin. With the exception of the first vote count released by the Registrar on election night right after the polls closed when Br
Read more

San Leandro's Unsustainable City Budget

-
Yesterday, I attended a meeting of the San Leandro City Council Finance Committee. The committee consists of Mayor Santos and Councilmembers Prola and Gregory. Gregory was absent. In short, if significant action is not taken, the city will burn through all of its reserves, including eventually reserves for natural disasters and other emergencies. By 2015, San Leandro could join the City of Vallejo in declaring bankruptcy. Summary of Finance Committee Presentation Perry Carter, the Interim Finance Director, gave an update on the budget. In analyzing a budget, you need to examine at least three years of data - the previous, current and next fiscal years. Carter first reported on the "preliminary actual" numbers for the fiscal year which just ended on June 30, 2009. Illustrating how quickly the city finances collapsed last year, the original city budget for fiscal year 2008-09 assumed $76.2 million (hereafter simply "M") in revenues and $81.6 M in expenditures.
Read more