OPINION
BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
City officials hate it when you bring up their surpluses.
When voters hear that Redwood City, for instance, banked a $58 million surplus, they will naturally ask why they need to support higher taxes if the city has all that money in the bank.
Some cities have tried to explain the surplus away. Redwood City, on the other hand, simply denies it has surplus. See item from the city’s website below.
That’s a flat out lie.
The surplus was reported by Maze and Associates of Pleasant Hill, an independent certified public accounting firm that reviewed the city’s finances and produced an annual comprehensive financial report, which is a public document. The annual financial report is required by state law.
If the city believes that it doesn’t have a surplus, then it should sue Maze for making errors in its report. But even city officials know that claiming they didn’t have a surplus is preposterous.
So at last Monday’s council meeting, Redwood City Assistant City Manager Michelle Poche Flaherty admitted the city does have surpluses, but they’re not “exceptionally large.”
I guess $58 million isn’t large to the well-paid civil servants in Redwood City.
Flaherty said:
“The bottom line is that Redwood City does not have an exceptionally large budget surplus. I’d say suggesting that we do is a little like looking at your paycheck and imagining you can spend the whole thing on black Friday shopping. When actually you know you are going to have to use it to cover the coming month’s rent, utilities, groceries, gas.”
That analogy is flawed because cities don’t use their surplus to pay the bills. The surplus is the amount of money left over after the city pays its bills.
Flaherty either doesn’t understand what a surplus is, or is intentionally misstating what it is.
At a time when people are being hit by inflation, high gas prices, and rising housing costs, the city should stop thinking about tax increases and instead return the surplus to residents in the form of rebate checks.
With a $58 million surplus, the city could afford to give every resident a $700 rebate.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays. His email address is [email protected].
False statement from Redwood City’s website:
I wrote a similar opinion concerning local city surplus funds several years ago. A local newspaper printed my opinion citing the “Rainy Day Fund”, something the local small government bureaucrats refer to with pride in San Carlos. My perspective about local authorities generating a profit from the pockets of local taxpayers and describing it a SURPLUS is not what local taxpayers expect their local municipalities to be engaged in. I argued that small citiies are not businesses seeking to make a profit. Nevertheless, my printed opinion was criticized by several current & former council members from the city of San Carlos who rationailzed the need for such a fund when no such need is written into the charter of the city, and no voter would ever endorse it. Mr. Price is correct when suggesting the money from this fund needs to be redistributed back to the taxpayer.
As a 5th generation Californian, I finally packed my family up and left 6 years ago because the State was going nuts!
The politicians appetite for taking money from the public is insatiable. Elitists don’t realize that if the Socialist utopia they are pursuing is fully realized, they will be the first ones before the firing squads.
I moved to a state where the focus is on God and the family. Beautiful scenery, lakes galore, and wonderful fishing and hunting.
The state operates on a balanced budget. I just got my property tax bill, it went down by 31%. Enjoy paying for all those “social programs” down there.
Hawkeye, elitists aren’t really concerned about your pedantic misconception of socialism for the common man. Today’s capitalist free market elitists devised and implemented – Corporate Socialism, a new practice by which your federal tax dollars bail-out giant wealthy corporations and their corresponding elitist followers from impending financial failure & ruin. Hint: They also own and operate the firing squads that you refer to. You must truly suffer the indignity of a 5th generation Californian, in forced exile for 6 years in another state, to be critical of the state in which you no longer reside. It reads like the community in which you currently live haven’t any newspapers to write an opinion.