Council members,
I appreciate your convening for the upcoming August 8 ‘special meeting’ at a time when you could/should be taking summer time off.
Last week’s council meeting discussion of the hastily organized ten thousand dollar(!) tax payer funded ‘survey’ of 198 local people was clearly woefully inadequate and quite possibly biased. Interesting that climate committee advocates picked up the phone to be surveyed while lots of other local taxpayers didn’t… Those previous discussions to see if local tax payers - and of course people shopping at local businesses - could be convinced to pay even higher taxes resulted in three councillors voting ‘yes’ to a quarter cent proposal based on a very fuzzy premise.
Despite those three councillors having clear knowledge the county will be adding a proposed sales tax to a future ballot that will greatly help fund our unappreciated (by those same three sales tax increase councillors) fire service. In previous council meetings local fire chiefs took the time to phone in to essentially say ‘don’t screw up our county tax measure’ by adding a CoS local sales tax. This obviously and sadly fell on deaf ears.
The August 8th special meeting will be to discuss how to frame this latest ask of the local tax payers. We have a lot of young families and a lot of people on fixed incomes at Luther Burbank, Fircrest and other areas of the city who are going to really struggle with this additional tax burden on top of the upcoming water and garbage cost increases.
Despite frequent ‘equity’ posturing by some councillors, we are seeing a progressive reduction in quality of life for local people with tight budgets due to higher costs, underfunded services and of course a lack of spending on key infrastructure. By choosing fantasy projects such as reimagining the city center county library as a psych and transient help center, (despite it being completely unfit and not staffed to serve this purpose), factions within council are choosing to aggressively pursue their own personal schemes and dreams rather than be responsible overseers of our fiscal and hard working city staff. We are currently over burdening our city clerk and staff with a complex and expensive ballot initiative, which seems very unwise in the circumstances.
Assuming voters or the council reject the 1/4¢ tax proposal, clearly the bigger and more important question that has to be discussed is what future strategy is credible to stop the progressive deterioration of our city, both fiscally and physically.
The current mayor mentioned during the last council meeting she had previously campaigned during much healthier economic times - and was presumably elected- on a stance of resisting hotel building and commercial development.
I’d like to see some credible economic strategies discussed and agreed on by council to help the city revitalize and get back on the right tracks that don’t involve Faustian bargaining for handouts and grants with our local political establishment machine. This tactic has not served the city well in the past.
Thank you for all your efforts
Oliver Marks
Downtown Sebastopol