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Saginaw City Ballot Proposals Disingenuous, Regressive, and Undemocratic By Greg Schmid & Robert E. Martin Shakespeare once wrote how “the truth will out”, but whether people embrace it depends entirely upon how engaged and informed they are. This latest attempt by City Hall to lift Saginaw’s Tax Caps is far more dangerous, broad reaching, under-handed, and anti-democratic than anticipated. Five times since the voters of Saginaw imposed Property Tax Caps on City Hall in 1979, government officials have made the voter fight to keep the caps. Each election has been a waste of taxpayers’ money, and each time they have undertaken expensive “voter education” efforts (at taxpayer expense) to convince citizens that the tax limitations are bad for Saginaw, in addition to demonizing anyone who opposes lifting tax constraints as mean spirited and uncaring. Each time the government has devised new tactics to confuse and trick voters into a yes vote, but each time the government has failed by huge margins. These are the very real reasons why you should vote ‘NO” to all of the ballot proposals that will appear. Taken together, the City Ballot Proposals (and the process by which they have been placed on the ballot) are disingenuous, regressive, and undemocratic. They are nothing more than a cynical gambit being played out by a government class which has proven to be deaf to our voices, and bent on getting even more of your money by subverting the legitimate democratic general charter revision process. The general charter revision proposal got a landslide no vote. That was bad enough, but then after the charter election, the City Manager, and his benefactor Mayor Carol Cottrell, assembled a handpicked committee of city insider yes-men and labeled them a “Charter Commission”. Never mind that Michigan law provides for the public election of members of an official Charter Commissioners by the public, and that it specifically prohibits city employees and officials from being a part of the commission. Since the new “charter commission” was not actually a “charter commission” the law did not apply. As planned, the handpicked committee slowly regurgitated some easy charter changes, and mixed them up with a series of proposals intended to raise taxes, reduce government transparency, eliminate competitive bidding in favor of no-bid government contracting, insulate the city manager from City Council control, and create obstructions to prevent challengers from running for office. In our opinion, the government appointed commission served no purpose other than to provide political cover, and a rubber stamp, for the City Manager and council. After an orchestrated roll out of 25 charter proposals, the state told them to reduce the number of proposals to a manageable number. They finally chose eight proposals to place on the ballot this fall. Eight proposals at one election! That’s enough to wear out most voters before they get to the end, and how convenient for the government that the tax question is at the very end of the ballot. This too-clever-by-half tactical placement of multiple questions is something the city tried once before, when they asked to remove the tax cap in 3 different ways in 2004, but the advantage this gives them has emboldened the government to ask for a wholesale lifting of the cap, rather than simply lifting the so-called “dollar cap” or raising the rate limit. And while most of the proposals are mere window dressing, some are dangerous and deceptive antidemocratic moves designed to weaken the voice of citizens in city politics and strengthen the power of the political class. Look at Question One for an example of a deceptive question. To read the proposal, it might sound great to “…reduce the residency requirement from three years to one year to become a candidate for City Council.” But all the way back in 1979 the court ruled that the 3 year residency requirement was unconstitutional after Al Schmid sued the city on behalf of activist Joy Hargrove. Since then, the residency requirement has been 30 days, as provided by state law. So rather than “reducing” the residency requirement from 3 years to one year, the city’s new ballot proposal would actually increase the residency requirement from 30 days to a year. This restriction will result in a new civil rights lawsuit, at taxpayers’ expense. It is clearly designed to protect sitting councilpersons from being challenged, and therefore is self serving and undemocratic because it reduces the right of voters to choose the candidate of their choice. Proposal one is bad policy, and should be rejected by the voters.
Look at Question Two, which seems innocuous, but by reducing the number of required city council meetings and eliminating the fixed schedule of every two weeks will result in lower citizen input at council. People are accustomed to council meetings being held every other Monday night. By meeting only when they want to, at times of their own choosing, council members effectively eliminate notice of meetings to all but the most diligent activists. Everyday citizens should vote no on Question Two.
Questions Three and Four would provide another way to reduce citizen involvement in government under the guise of efficiency. It would end the requirement that “A summary of the council proceedings at each meeting shall be prepared by the city clerk and published in the official newspaper.” Sounds reasonable at first, now that the Internet has rendered area daily newspapers all but dead. The new technology makes it easy and cheap to disseminate information to citizens, but rather than insure greater transparency by requiring that summaries be posted conspicuously on the city website, Question Three only requires that the summaries be made “available to the public”. Question 4 says, “ The public must pay for copies of the minutes of council meetings.” How convenient for the government that a citizen might now need to ask to see the summaries, and pay for copies. That would help the government bury the truth until it is too late for the voters to do anything about it. In an age when public transparency is everything, our city government has repeatedly flexed its muscle to obstruct, frustrate, and delay the release of information about its corrupt practices and overspending. The public costs of transparency measures are cheap compared to the costs of hidden corruption. In the past year over 60 Michigan school districts and 8 cities have put their checkbooks online so the citizens can watch how their money is spent, but rather than follow this positive trend, the city government has instead chosen a regressive posture might save them a few bucks in the short term, but would cost us all plenty. They should have offered us a better deal on this one, and so Questions Three and Four should be rejected.
Questions Five and Six might best be summarized as the “Job Preservation Acts of 2009.” Once in place, it would take 6 votes on council to fire the City Manager and to hire a replacement, rather than a simple majority of those voting on the question. Great idea, if you’re a City Manager making five times the salary of the average city resident. If you’re a citizen this is not such a great idea. Our city government is already too unaccountable to the citizens. Even having an unelected City Manager takes power away from the citizens and their elected representatives. Proposals Five and Six go from bad to worse, and should be rejected by voters.
Question Seven also goes from bad to worse by all but eliminating competitive bids on city contracts between $2,000 and $10,000. Potential for cronyism and pay-to-play abuse would be enhanced, both now and in the future. There are already too many ways to circumvent competitive bidding in the current charter, where any government contract over $2,000 must be competitively priced. Instead of fixing the problems, the government proposal makes it worse by eliminating any competition requirements for contracts under $10,000. Bad policies like this go against a national trend in cities to prevent corrupt pay-to play schemes, where officials get paybacks for doling out overpriced contracts to their cronies on your dime.
Finally, Question Eight. Remove the Tax Cap altogether. The voters imposed the Tax Cap on City Hall in 1979, when City overspending was at a zenith. Of course, the government will tell you that the city is now living on 1979 dollars with no cost of living increase. But as was delineated in our last edition of The Review, now the government actually spends double the money they had back then. Double! The fact that some officials continue to repeat this falsehood means they are out of touch with reality. Either way, they can’t be trusted with the money we give them now, and they sure don’t need to squeeze us for more. First, in 1979 city hall spending was way out of control, and even if the city did have the same budget it did in 1979, that would be enough if the government officials would prioritize and not engage in self-dealing. The tax cap was meant to shrink city government, not just to prevent it from growing. Second, the City Hall budget is now twice what it was in 1979. After the tax cap was imposed, government officials refused to listen to the public outcry for fiscal restraint. Instead, they shifted revenue-raising tactics from property taxes to increased income taxes (which killed jobs and incentivized high income homeowners to move out rather than pay). They also shifted trash collection and the government bus line to a special millage. Recently, they held public safety hostage and literally forced voters to accept a new 6-mil property tax on the threat that police and fire would be drastically cut if voters didn’t pay up. There are ways to improve the tax cap after 30 years. Changes in state law in the 1990’s made the so-called dollar cap less important, and if city hall were serious about sensible reform that would allow for inflation they would simply ask the people to remove that limitation. Yet, after all these tries, they still cannot make that modest request. They cannot resist the temptation to get more. They simply cannot restrain themselves. In the end it comes down to trust. American’s have faith in God, but do not and should not trust government officials without serious enforceable limits and protections in place. Like the Bill of Rights, which protects us from having our basic civil rights trampled, the Tax Cap places a modest limit to prevent government officials from extracting money from us every time they want to spend on some pet project. You don’t need to look far back into history to tell whether Saginaw citizens should trust city hall with their money. The city proposals, each one of them, are bad policy and sharp politics. Fall for it this time, and pay the consequences.
FINAL THOUGHTS Throughout this Candidate Forum, attempts are made by certain candidates to discredit and impugn the integrity of the legitimately elected Charter Commission of which Greg and I were both members, along with the innovative work of that Committee to increase governmental accountability, save money, and make Saginaw a prosperous place for people to live, work, and build a future within. It is true that as Councilmen Scharffe & Branch point out, that the elected charter commission's revamp got beat five to one - but a far more disturbing and sobering fact is that only 2 out of 10 registered voters bothered to vote one way or another on change in the first place; so what does that tell you, apart from the fact that 80% of the city is so alienated and disillusioned by local government that they don't care one way or the other what happens. We predicted this alienation would increase over time; but now is not the time for it to take deeper roots. Rather than being ‘out of step’ with city voters, one of the reasons Charter Revision was defeated so badly back in 2007 was because of the sizable budget from vested interests that outspent us while managing to distort and miscast what true charter revision would actually have accomplished, blowing certain elements out of context while ignoring others that established the rationale for what we were doing, and how it would have saved the city money and improved efficiency. One of these measures consisted of merging police & fire departments into one Public Safety department, which was advanced in an independent study that the City paid thousands of dollars for years ago, and supported by numerous business leaders throughout the community. Another was to establish a City Ombudsman to take bids for services. If it currently costs $50,000 for one lawn cutting in the summer months on city owned-common areas and parks, certainly this could be put out to bid from any of the many lawn service companies within the city, that in these challenging economic times, could definitely have used the business. As for Public Safety, merging police & fire departments could have saved the city $3.5 million per year. Combined public safety departments currently exist in Kalamazoo, Albion, East Grand Rapids, Farmington, Greenville, Ironwood and Petoskey. Why not Saginaw? Another good idea would be to get the city’s out-of-control pension system in place. 85% of public sector works have defined benefit plans in addition to social security and the majority of those plans allow them to retire 10-25 years earlier than is permitted by Social Security, not to mention free or heavily subsidized health insurance during the period of ‘early’ retirement. And would this move to lift the cap be necessary if the still nameless person (or persons) in the Budget office had not improperly sent $1.6 million from industrial property tax abatements to the Saginaw Board of Education headquarters? Finally, several candidates in the current forum chastise The Review for posing a question about MSHDA money being curtailed, so they will have to face the choice of what areas of the city to delegate funds towards. This is a very real issue, as word coming out of Lansing is that the state will not provide the city sufficient money to handle all of its development and renewal goals on both sides of the river – therefore, serious decisions will need to be made: do we repair the potholes on Court Street, stabilize formerly solid west side neighborhoods now on the verge of collapse, or continue to dump money into Downtown Saginaw and the Cathedral District? In the final analysis, there is no way increasing taxes on those within the city that still have property of any value will accomplish anything other than drive the final nail into the coffin. I cannot begin to tell you how many realtors have told me that people are opting for $70,000 homes in the township as opposed to $70,000 homes in the city, precisely because of high city taxes. The current council may ‘pledge’ to hold the rate down; but if history proves correct, we’ll be up to 20 mills in the near future – and therein lays the problem; very easy to tax & spend, very difficult to adhere to fiscally responsible actions. Saginaw is fortunate in one very important sense: with the Tax Cap in place, it is one of the few entities throughout the nation whereby government is forced to live on a budget; and it serves as one of the few protections that citizens have against out of control government. The fact that City Hall and its so-called leaders lack the imagination or wherewithal to move forward is a testament to lack of leadership, certainly not the means or methods to creatively move forward.
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