2011-04-27 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MAYOR KENOI: I mean that’s the reason. So when you hear somebody say, eh,I got it and this is what we’re going to be like, come on. Stop shouting and yelling. It’s not accurate but you never hear me go, not, that’s not true. Cause that’s just unproductive energy. I don’t go around and engage in bickering in public and use the media. It’s just time to work. But that’s what I mean. So, we’re constantly, and throughout the year people are coming in because we have restrictions at every step. So people get denied and then they circle around the committee, right? Eh, Mr. Mayor, can you –and I say, okay, you can state your case, but it’s got to be persuasive and compelling, cause the price of leadership is no. I have to tell people no. Remember asking me and Villaraigosa, Los Angeles, sitting next to him, I said, hey, what’s the most important thing about being mayor? He said, you have to learn how to tell your friends no. That’s absolutely true. I have to learn how to tell my staff. You can see them hunch their shoulders and their head because they come in and it’s important, and to them it’s the most important. But I see things a little differently. I see everything. And I say cannot. I have a tough request. I have requests from this office and this office. An amended budget staff would be so easy to say yes to. But it’s troubling because it’s additional cost. And everything, me and Bill had this conversation the other day, in fact I was at the Legislature fighting for the TAT yesterday. I got to go back. So they were all bemoaning, what about 10 years ago when you could just give money, you know, you could say yes, that the senators would attack him, but Bill told me, whoa, it doesn’t end. But what we knew in year one was we knew it was going be tough for three years. Our budget cost cut, you know people like, payroll lag, like we just came up with that. We had that from day one. We knew that we could save $6 million by implementing a payroll lag. The governor did it. All three other counties did it, but you can only do it one time. It’s a one shot deal. So I held that for three years. But this is the year you have to use it. This is that year -$6 million. Furlough every employee for two days, you save $7 million. One payroll lag, $6 mil. Of course I’m going to use that now. But we knew, that’s right, at every stop, all our decisions, ask Bill, every year the county previous would do just annual budgets. This year we look at the budget, we look at Real Property Tax, appraisals, we do a best guesstimate and we work with that guesstimate till we get final numbers. But my first year, I said, ehguys, I want a two year budget. As we working this year, I want next year’s numbers. And unbelievably, pretty close. You know, they said 40, came 44.8. I know one time we were going up to 50 cause was plummeting and shallow. But you know, I said when we were doing this 44.8 balancing, we looked ahead and they said 40. It came out 38.8. So we’ve been, when we make a decision on this budget, we’re already looking at the year ahead to make sure that we’re not making short sighted decisions that cost us later. And we make a revenue adjustment like last year, right, I had to raise the, adjust the property tax rates. You’re 44.8. You cannot cut 44.8. It’s 23 million, but was revenue mutual. And I said you should have took GASB last year. You shouldn’t have raised that. We would have $60 mil in the whole this year. How you get out of that one? So, knowing next year, last year going be tough, this year, hey, you have to make the tough decision. So it’s a residential class, the second homeowner, the homeowner exemption, I get 5.55 per thousand. We didn’t touch the homeowners. Business, commercial, industrial, 10cents per thousand in valuation last year. But I mean if your property drop, it goes up 10 cents per thousand and it’s what a dollar for 10? $10.00 for 100. $100 per million in property. That’s what went up. But that’s what you had to do. You have to do that because if you don’t address your revenue in year two of a three down cycle, year three you’re smashed. Like 38.8, you add 23 to that, it’s 60 million, unless everybody suffers. 13