Fiscal Responsibility
by Dale Tyler

When you ask people what they want from their government, the most common answer one gets is more or less “spending our tax money wisely”. Republicans mostly want the government to lower taxes and thus spend less.. Democrats want to raise taxes so that there can be more government programs. However, the vast majority of both groups want the government to make the most of the taxes they pay. Here in Mission Viejo, the city government takes the opposite position.

At several recent City Council meetings, the majority of the City Council, refused to rebid any contracts for services provided by private companies. That means, despite an increasingly competitive environment where businesses all over this city and country are finding ways to cut costs, the City of Mission Viejo is happily spending taxpayer money on services at the same rate as prior years. Now, I'm not suggesting that we try and cram lower prices down these business' throats. Instead, I believe that there is a way to take advantage of lower energy and labor costs that make up a big part of the bid price to lower the city;s costs. Remember, gasoline was 33% higher last summer. Also, perhaps we don't need the gold-plated services that Mission Viejo typically bids for. In any case, just requesting new bids would have made sure that we were getting the best price and most needed services from our contractors. Even better, it would have offered new opportunities to companies not currently doing business with Mission Viejo. The foundation of capitalism is competition, but that is not the way of Mission Viejo.

Of course, this lack of interest in lowering the costs of Mission Viejo city government is hardly surprising, given the attitude of most of our city staff. One does not go to work for the government to try and save taxpayers money. Since working for the government is mostly about job security, it is not surprising that there is very little incentive for government workers to be innovative about cutting costs, since that might mean that government would be smaller and need less staff. In private industry, innovation increases sales and profits, which lead to more jobs. Government employees are trained to find ways to look like they are doing more work by inventing make-work projects. On recent example of this is the failed Rose Bowl float, which the vast majority of citizens say they did not want.

The top levels in Mission Viejo government are responsible for most of the waste in the City. Dennis Wilburg, the City Manager, has been involved with the Rose Bowl for many years. So, when he saw an opportunity to influence the weak willed City Council, especially Kelley and MacLean, he went to work. Once Kelley and MacLean had been co-opted, it was easy for Dennis to claim that this was a City Council initiative. Another example of this is Keith Rattay,Director of Public Services. He spends taxpayer money on useless projects ranging from the easels used for the fake photo exhibit last year that were thrown on the trash heap the next day to the huge pillars of concrete block in the middle of Crown Valley Parkway covered with what appears to be pictures made under the influence of drugs. He spends money for plants to be used to “beautify” trails, then ends up throwing most of them away because of poor planting practices. None of these provide any utility to the taxpayers, but Keith, in an effort to expand his empire, keeps finding more projects like this.

As a further proof of how inefficient Mission Viejo government is, consider this. In 1990, the city had 72,820 residents. In 2000, there were 93,102 and today there are nearly 100,000. In other words, there was a 37% increase in the city's population from 1990 through today. Yet, the number of full time equivalent people employed by the city has grown from less than 60 to 150. This represents a 150% increase. While some of the increase is due to our having our own library staff as opposed to paying the county for library services, it is undeniable that the size of Mission Viejo government has at least doubled with only a 37% increase in population.

I think it is time for our city government to become more efficient. To that end, we need to remove all incentive for city employees to expand the size of government by going to a zero-based budget for the next 10 years. This would mean that no increases in spending would be allowed unless it could be shown that population increases directly caused a requirement to increase spending, which is unlikely, since the city is built out and population increased only 0.4% per year from 2000 to 2006. Also, increased spending would be permitted if these were changes in the actual costs of delivering existing services. There should be annual competitive bidding for all city services to ensure that we get the best price. No new services would be permitted unless balanced by the reduction of existing programs and inefficiencies like spending $7M on a luxury facility that only 0.2% of the people use would be eliminated.

Today, fiscal responsibility in Mission Viejo government is an oxymoron. The citizens of Mission Viejo need to stand up and replace the big spending City Council members who are most responsible for the mess we find ourselves in: MacLean, Kelley and Ury. Once these folks are gone, we can rebuild the city in to the small government model we were told we would get when the city was founded.