[Durham INC] let's help the City with ideas...

[scjdurham at aol.com]

Here's a novel idea.  Let's raise occupancy taxes on hotel rooms, bring 
back that prepared food tax, come up with some sort of entertainment 
tax, etc.

A huge percentage of non-Durhamites come here to work and take their 
money home to their municipality.  But we pay to protect them when 
they're here including police, fire, EMS and don't forget about the 
road use going back and forth from their city to ours.  They are very 
welcome here but it would be nice if they paid their fair share.

Some of the above items would be listed under discretionary spending.  
Folks can decide whether it's how they want to spend their excess $$ or 
not.

Property taxes really hurt those on limited incomes, living on their 
social security benefits, living on unemployment compensation or who 
have just timed out their unemployment or simply can not secure a 
higher paying job.

Food for thought.

Cheryl Shiflett

-----Original Message-----
From: Randy Pickle <rwpickle at gmail.com>
To: inc-list at durhaminc.org
Sent: Fri, Mar 5, 2010 2:17 am
Subject: [Durham INC] let's help the City with ideas...

to make the budget ends meet. I've been saying this everywhere I go. 
Surely as a collective unit we can tell them where we see pork or come 
up with some place to save some cash.
 
Here's my 3 ideas:
 
1) We have a fleet of new garbage trucks; they have yet to get the 
massive graphics package that you regularly see on the trash can end of 
the truck. So what... We all know it's a garbage truck. Leave the fancy 
graphics off. Maybe that will even help with resale...
 
2) Fleet says we have 2100 units in service as a City; 500 are fire and 
safety. Let's leave those alone. That still leaves us 1600 units. Let's 
cut that by 25% (down to 1200 units). Between the fuel, maintenance, 
and gift giving of them to other cities, that's bound to be a big 
figure... Fleet told Budget they needed $7M this next year. When ask 
how they came to that figure they were told the computer program they 
use told them. Budget told them to tell the computer to figure out how 
to pay for them since it was so smart and reduced it to $1M.
 
3) Employees... IBM laid off a 1000 workers recently. It's the fastest 
way to make government leaner (and with less vehicles, that works out 
as well). I personally would help add some of those employees to a list 
(since I have found recently that some seem to take their jobs for 
granted). There's no tenure in government and some off the folks we 
have working for us have fallen into a comfort zone where they just 
think showing up enough. As far as I know, we still think of it as 
work. And it's time to get back to it...
 
We started off the budget process with a $16M gap; at the neighborhood 
Engagement Workshop we heard it was $13M; in the budget prep meetings 
this week it's now down to $8+M. So we're getting there.
 
Send me your ideas (not your jokes about it all; be serious) and I'll 
forward them on to their targeted individuals. Maybe someone out there 
has just the idea that will make it all work. Otherwise get ready to 
pay more in property taxes. They never seem to go down, only up... And 
you have to pay them every year... So once they go up, we're stuck.
 
RWP
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