CS78 said:
Bob Yancy said:
We scheduled a public hearing for a proposed tax rate (unchanged) that is lower than Waco, Corpus, Denton and Bryan, et al.
Respectfully
-yancy
First, thank you for being here on the forum.
But, municipalities really need to stop comparing themselves to each other. It always feels like they're justifying their overspending as ok, just because their neighbor has an even bigger spending problem. If my neighbor spends $80k on a new car, it doesn't make it ok for me spend $70k.
That's fair. There have to be multiple benchmarks to determine how a city is doing. Ours city isn't perfect to be sure. I do contend however, that it's pretty darn good. Like many on this platform, I too get frustrated with government. Before I was elected to council, I had strongly held principles about government and strong opinions about how our city was doing. My principles remain unchanged, but some of my specific opinions about the city are different. Not all, but some.
As those beliefs were challenged, I did and still do headache inducing research to understand objectively where we are at. I don't know any other way but to compare us in key metrics to similar cities.
When it comes to employees per capita, we aren't bad off. When it comes to comparable tax rates we are doing really good. When it comes to debt per capita we're better than average. When it comes to bond rating agency ratings we are in an excellent position. When it comes to water quality, sanitation and fire protection, we leave other cities in the dust. As tough as traffic is at times, I just put a traffic analysis outside expert through the wringer at our last council meeting. With a few glaring exceptions, he reports we are ahead of the curve.
On discretionary spending, we have a lot of parks. We just approved another one, but there's a backstory there as to why. Setting parks aside, our capital projects are routine and typical municipal capital projects. The largest capital project in College Station history is a wastewater treatment plant. In our latest budget, a super majority of the capital projects are traffic related. Compared to our budget size, discretionary spending is low and that's why our bond rating is the second highest possible.
Improvement areas? In some cases we need to work on transparency. We need to be more business friendly and fast track housing projects. We've fallen behind in police force size and it must be addressed with urgency. We need the Macy's monkey off our backs without losing taxpayer dollars. We need to stay on top of O&M and seek ways to cut costs to keep that tax rate low in the face of growth. We need to address water and wastewater capacity to keep up. We need to coordinate with TxDot better rather than seeing them as a silo that's going to do what they are going to do. We urgently need help from my beloved Alma mater in student housing and public safety. Yes, we wouldn't be where we are without them but that argument wears thin given the horizon view of what's happening and what's to come. We need to turn our economic development focus from retail to salaried, professional employment. We need to be actively pursuing the JETI program to bring those six figure salary jobs to town, with urgency.
There's a lot more too, but that is one councilman's view of the State of the City.
Here endeth the rant and my $.02
Respectfully yours,
My opinions are mine and should not be construed as those of city council or staff. I welcome robust debate but will cease communication on any thread in which colleagues or staff are personally criticized. I must refrain from comment on posted agenda items until after meetings are concluded. Bob Yancy 95
