Letter: City residents deserve better reporting

Did you know Hollister had to borrow about $920,000 recently from an enterprise fund to pay a bill it owed the county? The loan was necessary to take advantage of future savings from moving emergency dispatch to Santa Cruz 911, but the fact that we had to borrow the money shows just how little financial wiggle room we have left. Unfortunately, the loan becomes just another piece of the puzzle usually shown to public only a little bit at a time. City budgets and finances are complex issues under the best of circumstances, when there is no central thread to hold the information together it becomes impossible to see the big picture.
Thursday, the deteriorating conditions in Stockton and Compton were the subjects of separate stories in New York Times and LA Times; last week it was the same for the City of San Bernardino. Buried in the Compton story were references to the serious financial difficulties in Victorville and Montebello. According to the LA Times, “Victorville used a series of disparate, possibly illegal measures to stave off insolvency. Those included dipping into sanitation funds to help keep the city’s treasury afloat, loaning water agency funds to bail out the city’s electric utility and siphoning $2 million in airport bond funds to buy land for a city library.”  Montebello has similar discrepancies. “We borrowed money from all over the place, from all sorts of restricted funds. Every type of restricted fund, we have borrowed from it at some point to balance the budget,” said Councilwoman Christina Cortez.
We owe!  Hollister’s high personnel costs are driven by the $1.1 million in annual “side fund” payments – really loan payments – we send CalPERS. Recently, the balance of those ‘loans’ was more than $11 million.  The RDA bonds have a current debt value of $42 million, add the interest due over the next 20 years and it’s more than $70 million. Then there are the sewer bonds, which rolled over some debt from earlier sewer bonds.
I’m not even sure of the loan balance on the sewer bonds and that’s exactly the point; the city residents deserve a consolidated report that shows our entire financial condition in a consumer oriented format. The report will serve as an early warning system for the public and demystify city finances – and that’s good because excessive debt can destroy the city.
Marty Richman, Hollister