County Issue / State Budget :...

Grant Brimhall, City manager, Thousand Oaks

I think there are probably three things that could and should be done. Number one, they desperately need to clean up the worker’s compensation mess. It’s driving jobs, it’s driving but income, it’s driving state sales tax--all budget-balancing revenues--out of the state. Therein is the greatest problem, and yet there has been failure year after year to really address that issue. That is the cancer in our state, and Band-Aids put together with money stolen from cities is hardly the answer. The second thing that they can do is recognize that the half-cent sales tax, due to sunset June 30, does not have an adverse impact on the state’s economy and it ought to be allowed to stay in effect until jobs and the related revenues come back from the current situation. Thirdly, the state needs to be proactive on getting jobs back in the state and keeping them in the state.

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Toni Young, Councilwoman, Port Hueneme

I do think that local folks should get together as a bloc within the state, which they do in the California League of Cities. They have a lobbying power there, and they should go to the state and say that what they take from the cities, they darn well better take from themselves. They should look at what they’ve been spending their money on, how bloated they’ve become. I really think that an example has to be set by those at the top, whether it’s their staff budgets, their personal budgets, whatever they need to do. I really think they need to say, “I’m going to make my life just as difficult as everybody else’s.” I want to see how many commissions there are in the state. I’d like to see what their budgets are and then I wouldn’t mind writing a letter to Mr. Wilson and saying, “Doesn’t this seem just a little excessive?”

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Cathie Wright, State senator, 19th District (R-Simi Valley)

First of all, they should request that the state, before it even gets into the budget negotiations, should look at (Assembly Bill 8), because that was the initial bailout. Back in 1978 when Proposition 13 passed and in 1979 when AB 8 passed, they decided because the state had a surplus that they were going to bail out the cities because of the loss of property taxes. Maybe we should have only done that for one year, and not done any more. Maybe the complex issues that we have today are because of that. The second thing they should do is look at what mandates are placed on them by the state that they absolutely, truly feel would relieve them of cost. Tell us, “This is what we can do, this is what we absolutely cannot do.” If we had that kind of input, we’d know what we’ve got. The third thing they should look at is ways in which they could give us an alternative. They’re in the trenches. Give us some alternative that they see locally that they feel the state can be doing instead of taking these dollars.

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Bert Bigler, Manager, Budget and Administrative Services for Ventura County

I think there needs to be a whole redefinition of roles and responsibilities between local and state government--who performs certain functions and the funding sources. Right now, the state’s approach is simply to say, “We’re going to cut back funding, take money away from local government and then local government, you go do your thing.” Really, the right way of doing things is saying, “Here’s who we want to provide services and how we want them provided,” and then divvy up the money up front to do that. Everyone realizes that there’s definitely a funding shortfall in the state and local governments. My view is that services still have to be cut. I think it’s a combination of removing mandates or funding mandates and doing things differently in terms of restructuring state and local government. It’s a whole relooking at how services are delivered by local and state governments and defining clear roles and responsibilities.

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Sandi Webb, Councilwoman, Simi Valley; member, Taxation and Revenue Committee of the California League of Cities

I believe that the state government has got to cut spending. There are so many areas that they can cut and need to cut. They have got to stop mandating programs for local governments to do and not funding them. They keep raiding our funding and then mandating more for the local cities and counties to do and then raising everybody’s taxes. It’s just the sheer fact that they are doing too much. They are spending too much and they have got to cut back the size of state government. What we have to do is take another look at the whole funding structure and get back to realizing that it’s the local government that provides probably 80% of the services that the average citizen needs and wants. Roads, police, fire, schools, the essential things of life. We have got to fund those things first out of available funds, and then the state gets whatever’s left over, instead of this top down approach where the state says, “We’re going to take all the money and you get what’s left over.”