This chart shows the General Fund is about 81% personnel costs. The numbers are in thousands. 3 zeros need to be added to the end of each figure. It was pointed out that General Fund expenses are things like parks and recreation, library, police, fire, etc.

It was mentioned that 74% of personnel services are for police, fire and street maintenance.

Development Revenue is the fees developers pay and fees property owners pay for building permits. Franchise fees are the fees the Southbay Power Plant and SDGE pay for having power lines on city land and producing electricity in the city.

As building permits go down the revenue from those permits also goes down (What was not mentioned is that if the permits are for new homes the expense of providing services to those homes never occurs. By law development fees can only be spent on what they were collected for. Obviously if nothing new is built there is no need for the fees, so it is hard to see the relevance of this information to the problem at hand.)

The chart shows steady growth in property tax revenue even if growth goes down.

If you add up the cents for CVESD (.29), SUHSD (.188) you will see it comes to less than the 55% school districts are required to get by law (47.8%). The state requires that this difference be made up by taking a part of the city’s and county’s share of the property tax dollar and putting into the Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund (.14). This appears to bring the schools up to 61.8%, but this is because some of the property tax has been diverted to the redevelopment agency and the schools only received less than 20% from these diverted taxes so the fund money coming from regular property tax dollars needs to be higher to make sure the schools get 55% overall. (http://www.californiacityfinance.com/ERAF_facts.pdf)

Sales tax went down so much in 2001, because of 9/11. Our former city manager said that 45% of Chula Vista’s sales tax revenue came from purchases by people from Tijuana and problems crossing the border ended that flow. It may be dipping now because people are simply not buying as much because of fears of losing their homes. Chula Vistans need to try to buy things in Chula Vista to help finance services.

Trash and cable companies must pay the city a franchise fee. They have contracts that have fixed this payment. Consumers pay on their energy bill a tax that goes to the city. The Southbay Power Plant is so old and inefficient that it simply is not used as much as in 2002. The fee it pays the city is based upon the amount of energy it produces.

In 2003 the city had a $30 million reserve. The state took money from cities because of its budget problems. The council planned to take this amount from the city’s reserves. After that expenditures outpaced revenue and the city began deficit spending using its reserves. If nothing is done the reserves may be gone by end of year.