Just hope and pray our city leadership finally snaps out of a
longheld, union-induced trance and realizes the train is real and
it’s roaring this way with no intention of slowing
– let alone stopping – anytime soon.
So your car stalls on the railroad tracks, and it just so happens a train is around a curve and barrelling toward you. How do you react?
A: Do whatever it takes to get the car across the tracks as fast as possible
B: Hope the train might stop in time before massive destruction occurs
C: Pray that it’s not really a train
If you’re not an official at Hollister City Hall, the question probably comes across as rhetorical.
Just hope and pray our city leadership finally snaps out of a longheld, union-induced trance and realizes the train is real and it’s roaring this way with no intention of slowing – let alone stopping – anytime soon.
That train, nurtured by financial mismanagement and compounded by the poor national and local economies, is a structural collapse in the city’s finances evident in the recent, mid-year budget report presented to council members.
Even including a slew of desperate, one-time injections that do nothing to alleviate Hollister’s structural imbalance – such as the legally questionable transfer of $1.2 million in RDA dollars to the general fund from the courthouse property sale – city leaders project an annual shortfall in just three years that is equivalent to about half of the operating budget.
Needless to say, those figures also include gradually using all of Hollister’s remaining reserve funds – which leaders instead should cherish and keep in savings as a safety net – and the numbers already reflect the anticipated, 5 percent pay cuts for employees that are nearly finalized.
In other words, that train doesn’t look so imaginary anymore, does it? As long as council members continue stalling, it will only gain speed.
There are no more saving graces left in storage. Revenues are failing to match costs at an alarming rate. The city is on track to go broke within two years.
This is the kind of emergency that should call for special meetings, intense discussions, sacrifice, and bold and creative ideas.
Where are the ideas, council members? You are, after all, the boss. This crisis cannot afford to endure the status quo – slow-moving union talks, unrealistic revenue projections based on retail that doesn’t exist, a waiting game for an economic turnaround. City officials have played the waiting game for seven years. It hasn’t worked.
Since the building moratorium hit, they incessantly have lived off of a once-flush savings account – artificially strengthened through the 1990s due to a lack of reinvestment into infrastructure with housing impact fees – which is now on its final descent toward bankruptcy. Former City Manager Dale Shaddox foresaw the now inevitable in early 2004 when he proposed laying off a then-stunning 36 employees. Internal pressures undoubtedly led to his departure, and city leadership since then has neglected to act on the message, annually using the reserve funds to justify a streak of habitual deficit spending that goes back to the early part of last decade.
Council members have a job to do – protect taxpayers’ interests – and they cannot concern themselves with the unfortunate impact that comes with layoffs or severe pay cuts.
Regardless, in time, there won’t be any money left to pay many employees in the current workforce. Council members must get a plan on the table as soon as possible and swiftly act it out.
By doing nothing more than listening to the disastrous mid-year budget report, they are further digging taxpayers into a hole that will get harder and harder to escape with anymore wasted time.
