Cheney residents bucked a couple of trends this past November.
In this era of anti-tax, distrust of government, residents who bothered to vote in the Nov. 3 general election voted to place their trust in what local government officials were saying and promising and cast their ballots to tax themselves more to fund public safety needs. That’s why the Cheney levy lid lift issue is one of this year’s No. 1 stories in the Cheney Free Press’s Top-10 Stories of 2015.
Cheney police and fire department officials have long been telling residents and council members that property tax revenues coming into the city’s current expense/general fund were not close to adequately meeting the needs of public safety. For Police Chief John Hensley and his officers, that means hiring 1-2 more patrol officers while for Fire Chief Mike Winters it’s replacing a 30-plus-year-old fire hose and beginning to find a way to fund a new No. 1 attack engine.
And those are just for starters. Both chiefs presented a long laundry list of items — Winters’ alone topped $1.5 million — to council members at an Oct. 6 budget workshop ranging from new appliances to replace the 1970s vintage ones in the fire station to shower upgrades at the police station.
Patrol Officer Nate Conley said the department has always been short on officers since he arrived on the force over 10 years ago. He and his fellow officers began working on a remedy in 2012, doing research and talking with city officials about the need to follow other cities leads and pass some type of funding measure for public safety.
“Our original idea was ‘hey, let’s go to the voters and see what services they want and how much they’re willing to fund to have at least an adequate police department,’” Conley said.
The work paid off several weeks before the Oct. 6 workshop. Police and fire officers convinced city officials to take a chance and ask voters to lift the city’s property tax levy lid and thereby increase revenues to the general fund.
Proposition 1 would perform a one-time increase of the city’s property tax levy from $2.40 per $1,000 of assessed valuation to its fully authorized limit of $3.10 per $1,000 of valuation. It would result in an estimated increase to the city’s general fund of $410,975.
While the money would go into the general fund, from which other departments also pull revenues from, city officials stressed the levy lid lift would only be for police and fire use, a pledge Mayor Tom Trulove reminded council members of at the Oct. 6 meeting.
The final ballot measure contained language allowing the city to use the additional revenue in other areas, but voters elected to take the city at its word, with 58.73 percent approving the proposition on election night. That margin grew to 59.32 percent by the time the election was certified Nov. 24.
Since passage, steps have been taken regarding the additional funding. The Police Department began advertising for candidates for a new patrol position, and a new category titled “Mayor’s Reserve” as added to the Administration Department’s budget as a place where the lid lift funds can be transferred and disbursed.
“It will look like the mayor’s budget went way up,” Trulove said in a Nov. 19 Cheney Free Press story. “(To) Be clear, it’s just a holding account. The mayor doesn’t have a slush fund.”
“We want to show everybody where we spend this money,” City Administrator Mark Schuller added.
Cheney will not receive its first installment of additional levy funding until May 2016.
John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.
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