Members of the Hollister City Council must be wishing they were
members of the U.S. Congress. With the U.S. Treasury printing
presses right down the street, they wouldn’t have to worry about
balancing their budget.
Members of the Hollister City Council must be wishing they were members of the U.S. Congress. With the U.S. Treasury printing presses right down the street, they wouldn’t have to worry about balancing their budget.
And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
We sympathize with their dilemma: How do you balance the budget when the sewer moratorium has put the brakes on growth? But that’s the reality.
So far the council’s solution has been to eat its seed corn. It has sold property to the Redevelopment Agency and taken cash from its reserves to cover a deficit that is in the neighborhood of 12 percent of its budget. One council member said this was the best they could do. We believe they can do better.
For six years city reserves have been declining. Living beyond your means for that long is simply bad policy. Deficit spending is acceptable on a rainy day, but the red ink faced by the city is structural. Structural deficits require structural solutions.
That’s why good policy would be for the council to take the lead in getting the sewer problems solved and the moratorium lifted. When it comes to the problems of Hollister, all roads lead to the sewer moratorium.
Since not a single elected official in San Benito County has been willing to do that, we urge the city to advocate the appointment of a temporary sewer czar who can rise above politics and push the project until it gets done.
The city council cannot just keep plugging the dike. There is talk of raising the sales tax, but that would require voter approval. As long as the moratorium is in place, voters would rightly question the necessity of a tax increase, even with the local rate being relatively low. They would demand to know, and so would we, why lifting the moratorium has taken so long. They would be in no mood to reward the council for not taking a harder line in getting the moratorium lifted.
If the council doesn’t take the long view more seriously, the short view threatens to get ugly very quickly. Having put off cutting costs now, future cuts may end up being even more painful. One layoff averted today may result in two or three layoffs down the road.
Is that the wishy-washy legacy this council wants – that its best, which clearly can be improved upon, wasn’t good enough? It’s that kind of limited imagination that has gotten the city to this fiscally irresponsible point.
