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...

I know I’m preaching to the choir a bit here, but sometimes the choir likes some attention too. We have all been in public hearings...

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...

With every passing day the State budget deficit seems to grow deeper. So what do the voters say to Sacramento? We don’t believe you. The...

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....

An RCS client recently relayed a conversation he had with an analyst from the Housing Policy Division of the State’s Department of...

In this time of financial uncertainty it has become common for cities, and even the State, to call for across-the-board reductions in...

A need for new revenue sources has caused the city of Riverside, population 210,000, to look at the services it provides and decide how...

O.K. so development demand is down, a lot! So what do you do? Plan! Over the past ten years a fairly common lament of many of our...

Last month’s newsletter ended with the question whether programs with their own funding source should be treated differently in the...

As the State concludes its annual kabuki dance over the budget, it reminds me of the fact that no one in State government is setting...

Here is my daily mantra: Development Impact Fees (henceforth DIFs) are not intended to be punitive. They are merely intended to...

I got a call recently from a California city interested in consultants that did long-range financial plans (LRFP). I couldn’t remember...

In last month’s article I wrote about what happens when you write a Program Budget and no one cares. In other words, you have identified...

Being someone who allocates costs for a living, it has become an axiom that if you can allocate costs then you do it. But is more...

In California, State legislation sets certain legal and procedural parameters for the charging of development impact fees (henceforth...

It is important to know the available hours of our employees, so that we can spread their total cost over these hours. Consequently, the...

Everyone has heard of the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-87. And everyone feels they need an A-87 Cost...

The A-87 CAP was created because our profession (Municipal Finance Officers Association, at the time) wanted overhead reimbursement on...