City council members should stop whitewashing the fact that Measure T has become a lot more of a security blanket than any kind of launch point.
In recently conversing over the proposed 2009-10 budget, the city council spent hours over-analyzing dollar amounts and percentages of itemized expenses funded by the Measure T sales tax boost as opposed to general fund dollars.
It's no wonder citizen participation is lacking at important public meetings. Even an accountant would have been snoozing before long - and probably confused - at the city's 2009 budget hearings.
Unintentionally or not, council members have clouded the reality that any added personnel costs related to the 2007 "Campaign for Hollister" - the city hired fewer than half of the planned number of new employees - have created an additional, annual burden once the tax hike expires in 2013.
In hindsight, it's clear Measure T merely has given council members breathing room while adding some time to an even larger, ticking bomb. At this point, the city would have been better off keeping employment levels status quo and squashing any notion of across-the-board raises, which council members regrettably awarded last year.
Part of the miscalculation - hiring eight new employees - is understandable because there was no way of predicing such a severe economic plight when officials had been touting their plans. Costs for employee raises are not, though, because city officials lobbying for the measure never mentioned such a huge chunk of the tax would go toward the compensation boost. They didn't mention it because voters wouldn't have approved the measure if they did.
Total, additional costs for the raises and new hires now come to about $1 million. If council members hope to close the structural deficit - and prevent having to ask voters for an extension to Measure T before April 2013, a political nightmare for all of them - they have another $3 million to cut from the budget on top of those costs.
Just for comparision purposes, $4 million is about a third of the entire general fund budget that is made up mostly of employee costs.
Throw in the estimate that it would take more than a year to see any actual revenue gains from a presumed economic turnaround, and council members have until some point around the start of 2012 - or two and a half years - to slash the budget and hope for significant revenue increases.
In the meantime, council members must stop trying to convince voters that the bright side of Measure T still exists around the corner. The only question still remaining for most taxpayers about the "temporary" tax hike is how council members plan to erase the need for it on the books, in less than three years, against emotional pleas from the employee base.
We suggest they start cutting costs now.
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