Ever wonder what it would look like if your city had to cut out 5% of the budget across the board? Costa Mesa considered this scenario. Here's what happens:
Number of Staff Lost - 8 city staff, 15 sworn officers
- 8 City Staff Lost
- 1 Administrative Services
- 1 Development Services
- 1 Finance Dept
- 3 Fire Dept staff
- 2 Police staff
15 Sworn Officers
- 6 Firefighters
- 9 Police
Service Reductions
- Close Pool from October to April
- Reduce Planning Commission meetings to 1 per month
- Cold Case Detective eliminated
- Not pave 2 residential streets scheduled for work
- Reduce funding for street maintenance including work on traffic signals
- End repair and replacement of catch basin entrance lids
- Reduce park maintenance - fixing turf & landscaping, lighting, mowing
There are more cuts, these are the ones the public will see first. Losing 5% of anything is bad, but these cuts can lead to longer time to process development permits (this includes your home remodeling permits, too!), deferred maintenance that can cause problems if deferred to long (like a street in front of your house that needs to be repaved), and loss of property values because the neighborhoods aren't as attractive as they could be.
We need to think about how to get this turned around before this scenario becomes our reality.
See the memo http://www.ci.costa-mesa.ca.us/council/agenda/2009-04-14/APR14-FY09-10_BUDGET_DEV_STATEGIES.pdf
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