Pillow Talk

By Lunch

One could arguably say that the Town of Mammoth Lakes is entering its most crucial budget cycle in the muncipality’s entire 25-year history.
By the most conservative of estimates, the Town has rung up a $6 million budget deficit over the past two years. This has forced the Town to sell assets, raid reserve funds, and slash staffing levels in an effort to keep the ship afloat.
Mammoth Town Council’s own handpicked Citizen’s Budget Committee warned Council during a workshop prior to its regular meeting Wednesday that the Town suffers from a “structural” budget problem.
So one would assume that Wednesday’s regular Council meeting featured a lengthy, in-depth budget discussion.
Wrong.
Council didn’t get around to it. In four-and-a-half hours, Council expeditiously worked its way through five agenda items and then called it a night.
It’s difficult to imagine a more unproductive meeting.
Thankfully, it was the last meeting Mayor Wendy Sugimura will preside over. Oops, scratch that. Her term doesn’t officially end until she hands over the gavel to Neil McCarroll at the first meeting in July. She’ll preside over a special budget meeting scheduled for Wednesday, June 24. That meeting will start at 6 p.m. in Suite Z above Elegant Bath in the Minaret Mall.
You may wish to visit Elegant Bath beforehand to buy a pillow. Based on its performance Wednesday, Council will be lucky to make its way through the Pledge of Allegiance by 6:45 p.m.
More than a dozen staff members (all on the clock) sat patiently waiting for the budget discussion which never occurred. Instead, they listened to a Council mired in minutiae, debating long-term planning policy while immediate crises were ignored.
This despite an impassioned plea from all members of the Council-appointed Citizen’s Budget Committee that Council recognize it has a serious structural problem within its budget.
The Committee made its report at a study session prior to the 6 p.m. regular meeting.
Committee member and Former Mayor Kirk Stapp said a lot of the problem is in the presentation. Council is typically presented a series of policy decisions, that, considered individually, are impossible to say no to. Who doesn’t want a school resouces officer? Who doesn’t want an ice rink? Every policy decision comes with a constituency. What he’d like to see is a broader approach to policy which might remove some of the immediate political pressure from the decision-making process.
Committee member and Former Mayor Rick Wood outlined some of the reason why the Committee believes there is a structural budget problem. Basically, you know something’s not right when you continue to regularly liquidate assets and reserves to maintain your operations. And these operations will only become more expensive when the Town’s employee furlough program expires next year.
In regards to the furlough program, Wood says he doesn’t support it. It may be admirable for all employees to take time off in order to preserve jobs as a whole, but Wood says the ultimate outcome is a reward for mediocrity, and it defers the difficult decisions surrounding who should really stay and who’s expendable.
The Committee’s also concerned about future obligations (like paying for ongoing air subsidies) which have no identified funding source. The Commitee also says decreased construction activity should force a reexamination of staffing levels within the Community Development Department.
John Vereuck, in particular, took issue with staff’s assertion that it needs to use General Fund revenue to maintain “artificially” reduced building permit and development impact fees.
This year, says Vereuck, permits are at an all-time low (484), and revenue from those permits is just $130,000. Meanwhile, his analysis shows we’ve got eight employees processing these permits at a cost of at least $500,000.
The “artificial” part, he maintains, is the excessive staffing and cost required to process these permits.
“This is one example of staff working for staff and not Town Council.”
A few other questions he believes Council should tackle during its budget deliberations:
Can we afford a staff of six people in the Finance Department?
Can we afford both a Town Manager and Assistant Manager?
Can we afford a police force for 30,000 people?
Can we afford the existing tourism staff?
Can we afford a Community Relations Manager?
As Vereuck said, “We do not feel this budget is balanced, even though it says it is … this budget is so full of inaccurate information we can’t believe any part of it. This isn’t about being a shell game. This is about out-and-out deception.”
Finally, he said if the Town Manager won’t carry out Council mandates, then Council should find itself a new manager.
Committee member Eric Wasserman was the final speaker. He took issue with the commingling of capital and operating funds within the budget. He also wondered why we spend so much money on consultants and don’t listen to half of what they say.
Which leads us to a final overarching question: if they {Staff and Council] spend a ton of money on consultants and don’t listen to what they say, how much do you think they’re gonna listen to a group of people (Citizen’s Budget Committee) whom they didn’t pay at all?

Which leads me to a column by Chip Johnson which appeared in Tuesday’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle (Wasserman take note).
“It’s been almost a year since Mayor [Ron Dellums] hired a consulting firm led by former City Manager Robert Bobb and paid $160,000 for a report to guide the city through a reorganization that reviewed every department – including a recommendation to cut the mayor’s staff by one-third. To date, none of the … recommendations has been implemented.”
This was something Dellums had promised to do.
When the Oakland City Council, seeing there was no movement from Dellums, decided to take up the issue and recommend $940,000 in cuts to the mayor’s office, the mayor went ballistic.
“Dellums’ reaction, “ wrote Johnson, “makes it seem as if Bobb’s report, and the $160,000 spent to complete it, was no more than window-dressing to appease residents and silence critics. His reaction … strongly suggests there was never any intention of following the sound recommendations in the study.”

To relate this to Mammoth, it literally appeared Wednesday as if Mayor Sugimura was purposely running out the clock on the Council meeting to avoid the budget discussion. To wit, at 9:30 p.m., when Council got to an agenda item involving the North Village District Plan Study, the Mayor said she really wanted everyone to be cognizant of the time (since Council meetings, by statute, must end at 10:30 p.m.) She then sat there and listened to Ellen Clark deliver a 25-minute staff report (I timed it) on an informational topic which wasn’t scheduled to be voted on, and didn’t interrupt her once to say, ‘Hey, maybe this can wait.’
At next Wednesday’s speical budget meeting, I can only assume she’ll push for adoption of the draft budget created by staff while further “study” of the Citizen’s Committee recommendations is undertaken. Nothing more than an appeasement of residents and an attempted silencing of critics. It was the worst-run meeting I’ve ever attended, and a fitting coda to Sugimura’s term as mayor.