Service Fees
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 [...]
Appeals Court rules against Business License Processing Fees
Last month, the Fourth District of the State Court of Appeals ruled in Weisblat v. City of San Diego, that fees collected for the primary purpose of revenue collection are a tax and not a fee. This will have particular implications for those cities in California that are charging a Business License Processing fee. The [...]
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. [...]
Ensuring Utilities Pay Their Way
In the early 1980s, we pioneered the use of the Franchise Fee as a fee for the use of a city’s rights-of-way by the municipal utilities. Our insistence on the franchise fee as a fee and not a tax flew in the face of conventional wisdom at the time, which considered it a tax. Our [...]
Long-Range Financial Plans
I got a call recently from a California city interested in consultants that did long-range financial plans (LRFP). I couldn’t remember the last time I had a similar call even though LRFPs had once been the rage. I mumbled something about how our approach was completely different than the historical LRFP process and left it [...]
Available versus Billable Hours
It is important to know the available hours of our employees, so that we can spread their total cost over these hours. Consequently, the example went on to divide the total dollar cost of our fictitious employee by the above available working hours for a resulting fully-burdened hourly rate. Putting this exercise in context, the [...]
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