That being said, newspapers are not an interactive or particularly vibrant media. It’s “wait a week to read the letters in the paper and then wait another week to read the reactions.” I think he would be well served to find ways for the News-Press website to better interact with — and react to — the FCT and Blueweeds.

For example, if the piece that I posted (or any other piece) was of thought to be of general interest, maybe the NP website could talk about it as well as the various comments and reactions — with enable links all around.

Anyway, I am not a media guy, but we have three decent outlets going in the City and there should be a way for all of them to be vibrant and successful.

Same with the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html

That’s where I stopped my research.

I’ve also struggled with the fact that the same conversation ends up happening in several places. I’m not sure what to do about that though. I do wish everyone provided an RSS feed of comments and not just articles (The FCT provides both – thanks!).

As to a substantive matter regarding the school budget, a few things to keep in mind: (i) it is the very largest moving piece of the entire budget (and the only one that has be growing at all in real terms), and (ii) the school budget is almost entirely driven by people — pay and benefits. The non-personnel side of the school budget is deminimus in the scheme of things. Worth examining — but not where you would find any real savings.

Thanks again for the quality of this discussion.

Also, this ended-up being a nice cross-fertilization between FCT and Blueweeds, at the suggestion of FCT staff. I would encourage Mike and the FCT to continue to find ways to interact productively (if not agreeably). The two sites do very different things but both add a lot of vibrancy to discussions about our community. Between these two sites and the News-Press, we should feel pretty lucky about the outlets this community has for expression and the close examination of issues. — David

Specifically, I would like our outside contracts assessed to make sure we are getting the best pricing for our outsourced functions. I would like to see an assessment of moving our courts to Arlington in terms of the future upgrade costs we will have to occur to meet the standards the court wants. We have a lot of police and sheriff personnel, I would like to see our numbers benchmarked against similar sized cities. I would like to see an assessment of our need for an offsite IT director if all in-house IT needs are serviced by onsite contractors. Could someone at city hall manage the IT contract?

I would like to benchmark our Recs & Parks fees against other community centers. I think many of current classes are cheaper than Arlington – at least that is what I have heard from Arlington parents. Could we raise the fees 5%? Are the current fees offsetting the facilities and staff costs (registation help, etc.)?

And frankly, I would like to compare our support staff/paraprofessionals to classroom teacher ratio to Arlington. My children have and are fully taking advantage of the enrichment our schools have because our classroom teachers have strong support staff/paraprofessionals helping them, but if you start counting the pictures in the Mt.Daniel lobby it seems to be 1:1. How much of the school salary line is for support staff and how much for classroom treachers? Could we afford to pay our teachers better if we adjusted the support staff ratio?

And, by the way, I have no problem dropping the Halloween and Easter candy events. My kids have enough candy. But we really enjoy the other events – Fall Festival, Memorial Day, Watch Night, Farm Days and they bring business to the city by pulling in citizens from around us to spend money in the city.

That’s a few of my specific questions/thoughts.

What has me agitated about our process is the continued references to unspecified “options” for major cuts to unspecified programs or personnel. I have tried to offer up specific items, so we could have a transparent discussion of tangible ideas. There is a very broad consensus in the City that we do not want to see major cuts in areas like Schools, Public Safety or Parks and Recreation, so we are left to do our due diligence in areas like employee compensation and benefits in order to see that the inevitable tax increases are balanced against sacrifices from all of the relevant stakeholders.

What is different this year is the divergence in the impact on different classes of property. as was pointed out Single Family homes are not declining, while Condos continue to lose value and commercial property is in free fall. This means that a 10¢ (9.5%) increase to equalize RPT revenue from last year would fall entirely on SF properties and result in a substantially lower tax bill for commercial owners. And this is not to suggest that 10¢ would solve the problem, but just as I said the other night it would be a more sensible point of departure for a reasonable discussion.

David is right that the magnitude of RPT rate increase necessary to come close to solving the problem without major service cuts is 20¢, meaning a $1,000+ increase in the median SF tax bill. This level of increase would produce $3M in the FY10 budget, which would (1) allow reconsideration of the CIP freezes and/or rebuilding the fund balance, (2) produce $3M in the Winter 2010 billing and (3) produce perhaps $3.1M in the Spring 2011 billing (assuming a modest aggregate assessment recovery or a smidgen of new development). This would reduce the projected “gap” to under $2M, although it is worth pointing out that the gap assumed a certain amount of pain particularly on the school side already.

What I have heard from citizens is that the Council should be seeking to preserve what we have and that people are willing to pay more rather than see wholesale cuts that will undermine the very reasons why we all live here. I hope we can find ways not to resort to a tax rate increase at this level (2¢ on the meals tax might reduce the 20¢ to 17¢), but the list of short-term alternatives is diminishingly small, and I have yet to hear any specific idea from anybody of specific cuts that would go beyond the proposals implemented by the City Manager to address the FY10 shortfall.

I don’t disagree with your point – but there’s no magic formula here. If we’re all putting in less money (in taxes) then something has to give on the other end (services).

I think my main point on all this is that the property assessments are all over the board. The general statement that most property assessments in the City are down doesn’t seem to be true (I’d love to see someone with direct access to the data run some reports – what percent of residential properties decreased in assessed value versus stayed the same or increased?).

When real estate assessments decline, I think it’s fair to assume that most people also would expect (and appreciate) a decline in their property tax bill.