What Keeping the Pool Open Really Means

When I first started doing this five years ago, I used to worry about not having anything to report or comment on.  What I have found in the five years since is that, while there are quieter times and more busy times, there is never really a period of time in Davis when nothing is going on.

However, with August’s break, the flow of city news does tend to slow down temporarily.  The unique thing about this year is that right after the council gets back from their break in early September, the city has major issues to consider and a looming deadline of September 30, by which time it has committed to finding $2.5 million in cuts to personnel costs.

We are reminded of this quiet and ticking time bomb by a letter to the editor of the Enterprise a few days ago in which the writer urged the city not to close Community Pool.

Closing the community pool is a tough issue for me because, first of all, it probably is underutilized and I am increasingly favoring having pools and other recreational activities run by community organizations and non-profits rather than by the city itself, which has scant resources.

We can always find a group of people who will back a particular service or expenditure.  Most services did not simply arise without community support.

At the same time, the public has largely been asleep on the pending city budget crisis.  I do not think the average person in Davis has any idea how bad the situation is that the city is facing fiscally.

If it takes closing services that people like to get their attention, then perhaps there is a value to that.  At the same time, I opposed the notion of using tier cuts to achieve budgetary savings precisely because of the above argument – why this service over that service.

What we need to do is fix the structure of the system itself, rather than finding savings through nickel-and-dime approaches.  We also desperately need the city to lay forth a vision for what the service priorities are, how they will be funded, and what services are optional.

To some extent, if we can shift the burden on some of these services to the community, we can alleviate fiscal problems with the city.

What caught my attention were the comments in the Enterprise in response to the letter to the editor urging the council to keep the pool open.

One is from Paul Brady, who wrote, “I, too am very disturbed by the planned closure of the Community Pool complex.”

But the key point is here, “As with many, if not most cities, previous city councils made contract promises to employees that we realize now were unreasonably expensive and almost impossible to keep without reducing city fire, police and community services. Closing Community Pool is part of the proposed reduction in recreation programs.”

He continued, “The problem is that these pension and healthcare costs are rising rapidly while Davis population and tax revenues are almost static. We just do not have enough money to pay these increasingly large employee costs, so it appears that pools and parks and programs will have to go.”

Crucial point: “The City Council needs to negotiate with employees, and ask them to pay some of their costs.”

Responding to Mr. Brady was an undisclosed individual under the title “Our not The” which I think should have been “Thee,” but I digress.

That individual wrote, “Mr. Brady would like to point out that keeping promises to the human infrastructure of the city, the employees who have worked their lives as part of the infrastructure that maintains the Community Pool, parks, and city support systems are what is taking the pool et.al. away from you and children such as yourself and Davis families. This appears as veiled (albeit misguided) opportunism, that shamefully rides on the heartstrings of a child. However, the note that tax revenues are ‘almost static’ does lead the discussion in a pragmatic direction.”

The individual continued, “If a community does not support sustainable and progressive taxation that keeps the promises it makes to itself – and as part of that Self, those that maintain the ‘things’ that bring the community together, the community may become a society that supports pointing fingers through fences instead of shaking hands in parks and retirement parties.”

And that letter concluded, “We have the choice of what type community we build and society we become, and we can not get there without keeping the promises we make.”

Mr. Brady responded and the key point in his response was: “The claim that the community does not support sustainable and progressive taxation is incorrect. We voted for an extra 0.5% city sales tax, a library and three school parcel taxes. Property taxes remain high as house prices have not declined much in Davis. We are in large part a public employee city, but we do not want to give up too many services and lose facilities without asking city employees to share some of the costs!”

The part that catches my attention in this interchange is the notion of “keeping the promises it makes to itself.”

We have spent many pages on this site recounting the history of bad mistakes that, along with a poor economy, have led us to the place we are at.  To summarize, during good times, we relied on the housing bubble and a one-time bump in sales tax revenue from a half-cent sales tax measure to pay for a stunning increase in compensation to employees.

The residents of Davis did not benefit from the economic boom of the last decade, the city employees did.

To put numbers on it, during one four-year period, firefighters received a 38% pay increase, police received about a 20% pay increase, and other sectors received more like a 10 to 15% pay increase.

80 percent of general fund costs now go to employee compensation, in the form of salary, benefits or retirement.

The result is that the city, in order to make ends meet, will have to cut spending and that means at the expense of the employee.

The question then arises as to what form does that take and which employees.

The promises, such as they were, that were made were not sustainable outside the narrow confines of the housing bubble that may have irreparably burst in 2008.

We cannot pay the employees their current level of salaries and benefits and also pay almost their entire pension obligations.  We cannot pay for people to stop working at 50 and 55.  We cannot pay for lifelong health insurance for people who retire when they have as much as 30 years additionally to live.

Before the recent collapse of the stock market and fears of a double dip recession, we were concerned that a new $7 million bill would be coming due in 2015 to pay for reduced earnings projections by CalPERS (California Public Employees’ Retirement System), coupled with rising health care costs.

In June, it seemed like there was a reasonable possibility that the $2.5 million cut was a strategic shift toward the council planning for the worst, rather than hoping for the best using overly-rosy figures.  Now it seems that that number is the mere tip of the iceberg and that we are going to plunge to depths that we have not seen for some time.

The reality is that closing Community Pool is probably the start of a steep retraction of city services that will be far deeper than even the worst pessimists believed.

Had past councils even for a moment paused to ask whether this behavior was sustainable they might have been able to foresee this crisis and move to prevent it.

But, as Stephen Souza seeks to run for reelection, we should forever remind him that in 2008, three months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, that he never saw this coming.  He and Don Saylor went from candidate forum to candidate forum bragging about a balanced budget with a 15 percent reserve as though it were stable and sustainable.

The reality is that it was never as balanced as the council dressed it up to be.  Unmet needs added up to $20 million in unmaintained roadways.  Unfunded health care liabilities loomed around the corner.  And worse yet, a house of cards was about to implode on itself in the form of pension and salary obligations, propped up by a housing bubble that even in Davis was about to burst.

In the face of this calamity, the petty argument over keeping our promises falls apart and, unfortunately, so too does keeping the pool open.

I have kids, too, who love the pool, but not at the expense of core services.

—David M. Greenwald reporting