Author Archive
Systemic Problems with Labor Negotiations
Many years ago, I audited a city in the San Gabriel Valley area of greater Los Angeles that was especially well-managed. One of the features that made this city exceptional was the process they used for labor negotiations. Before telling you what they did, I would like to summarize what many cities are currently doing. [...]
Rethinking Animal Control
When our company started doing cost of services studies in the early 1980’s, it was routinely suggested that 50% of animal control costs could be recovered from dog licenses. The other 50% was looked at as a public safety expense to protect the community from rabies. In other words, all residents of the community would [...]
Keeping Budget Problems in Perspective
I’m writing this on March 18, 2011, or seven days after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked Japan followed by a four meter tsunami that devastated the City of Sendai followed by a still unfolding nuclear disaster as the plume of radiation has finally made it to the West Coast. While we are cutting our budgets [...]
Capitalism and Local Government
One of the many nice features of our capitalist system is the ability to vote with our dollars to get the products that we want in the market place. When we go into a grocery store, we have many choices in the products that we buy and we can buy one item or many. The [...]
Development’s Winners and Losers
There are four players in the development game: developers, contractors, land owners and current residents. Each plays a critical role and each has goals that are not necessarily shared by the others.
Achieving the Potential of GASB 34
Statement 34 was adopted with much fanfare by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in June of 1999. By the end of 2004, more than 84,000 governmental units were required to include the (estimated) historical cost of infrastructure in their comprehensive annual financial reports. This statement had been circulating in various forms almost since the [...]
What Can Fire Fighters Teach Police Officers?
One of the advantages of seniority is that you can see how local government has changed over the years. One of the dramatic changes that I have witnessed in many California cities is the transition of the fire profession from the one-horse function of suppression to the full-team of fire/life safety. Many fire departments now [...]
The Downside of Water Conservation
This discussion is for the end-user water supplier that is not subsidized with tax dollars. You are about to start a dance that may take years to fully play-out. The act of raising water rates to discourage consumption or to compensate for higher State water rates will inevitably lead to a decline in water consumed. [...]
Sponsored by:
