Category Archive

We expect city government to be efficient and cost effective.

Taxes
City residents and businesses pay high taxes compared to those in surrounding metropolitan townships.  Our long-term goal must be, and is, to lower city taxes.  Lowering city taxes would spur development in our commercial districts, help developers who want to build affordable housing, help young families buy a home in our neighborhoods, and reduce the burden on our residents.

We must be candid, however.  Before we can lower taxes, we need to take care of the infrastructure needs identified in this plan.  And that will take time and a lot of money.  Reasonable estimates are 15 years and $30 million.

The first place to focus, therefore, is how the city spends our tax dollars:  whether city government could do things more efficiently, and whether city residents are getting the maximum possible benefit for each dollar spent.

COFAC
The COFAC group (Citizens Operations and Finance Committee) spent over a year studying these questions, and we are all in their debt for that service.  COFAC’s conclusion was that we receive excellent city services, but we pay a premium for those services.  The question we need to answer is whether we can reduce that premium without unduly compromising that excellence.

We believe that at least in some areas, we can do that.  Some of the COFAC group’s best recommendations include:

Pensions -  We need to meet our obligations to the professionals who spent their careers working for our city.  However, the current trend at which our pension obligations are growing is not sustainable.  Nor is it comparable to the private sector, nor to what is happening in other communities around the state.  We need to use all means that are legally available to us to reduce the unsustainable growth in our pension obligations.

Police Patrols – Traverse City residents are also residents of Grand Traverse County.  As county residents, we help pay for the Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s department.  Based on a per capita breakdown of the 2008 budget, Traverse City taxpayers pay a share of the county’s road patrol budget that adds up to over $800,000 per year.  Yet we receive no road patrol services from the county.  Instead, we pay over $3.6 million for police protection from the Traverse City Police Department, a budget which includes road patrol.  City residents deserve assistance with road patrol from the Sheriff’s department.  This would reduce the burden on city taxpayers for road patrol, saving us potentially millions of dollars over the next decade.

Community Police Officers -  The County also provides community police officers to townships who request them.  The townships pick up roughly 70% of the cost of these officers, and the County picks up roughly 30%.  The County is willing to provide this service to the city.   We need to look at a pilot program for using County community officers to meet some of  our city policing needs.  A pilot program would mean 4 to 8 officers to try it out.  The city would be protected by the same number of officers, but at a lower cost to city taxpayers.  By keeping the pilot program small at first, it would allow operational issues like chain-of-command and call responsibility to be worked through.  It is an idea worth trying.

Other COFAC ideas are discussed in the section of this plan on the city’s relationship to the Region.