[Updated: This article was updated on Nov. 11 at 11:45 a.m. to include the name of Gary Osterhout, who spoke at the Nov. 5 council meeting.]
[Updated: This article was updated on Nov. 18 at 2 p.m. to include comments sent in an email by Mayor Wayne Powell regarding city employee salary info on the city’s website.]
In an effort to address public outcry over the four new positions Manhattan Beach added last month, the city unveiled a new website that allows users to track the city’s finances and instituted a quarterly update.
The debut of these measures at the Nov. 5 council meeting ended with squabbling among the council over how the positions would be paid for. It also opened the door for more criticism from the public.
Gary Osterhout, a Manhattan Beach resident with accounting experience, was not impressed by the new website, OpenGov.com.
“I’ve used OpenGov, and I found it functionally useless,” he said. “It’s just a graphic analysis of what’s currently there in written budget. It’s at best an artifice that’s being rolled out by city hall to delude those without accounting knowledge that we have open financials.”
Osterhout also said that there was not detailed salary info for city employees on the city’s website, contrary to what Mayor Wayne Powell said earlier in the evening. Powell asked Finance Director Bruce Moe to find the info on the city’s website. After a few minutes of fruitless searching, Moe asked for more time to find it. When the mayor returned to him, Moe said the information was in fact not on the city’s website. Osterhout, who initially left after delivering his tirade but returned and hung in the back of the room when the mayor attempted to locate the information, left again, for good. The mayor then located some of the salary info he had referred to, although it was just for city councilmembers and not for all city staff.
Powell later said in an email that all of the info he had been searching for was on the website, although he hadn’t been able to find it because “the server was going really slow, and more importantly I was carefully listening to public comment.”
“The information is (and has been for several months) readily accessible on the city website at: http://www.ci.manhattan-beach.ca.us/city-officials/human-resources/classification-and-compensation/salary-schedule,” he wrote. “I’m not sure why Bruce Moe couldn’t locate it, other than the fact that for some reason the city server inside the City Council Chambers was going real slow.”
At the meeting, another resident, Esther Besbris, said that the decision to add the positions felt “predetermined” and made without any regard for the input from the community.
“Change is always important and we recognize that there are changes needed here,” she said. “But this has come too fast, too immediate, too unprepared, too large a quantum leap.”
Several members of the council agreed with some of the residents’ points.
“I respect the speaker’s comment that we did it too fast,” said Councilmember Tony D’Errico. “I’ll take my one-fifth ownership of that.”
D’Errico said that he was not happy with city staff’s solution to pay for the positions by putting off IT improvements and other necessary expenses.
“This is not finding the money for these,” he said. “It’s delaying the expense.”
He suggested paying for the new positions with budget cuts.
Mayor Pro Tem Mark Burton said that he thought they could afford the new positions by hiring fewer outside consultants. Councilmember Amy Howorth disagreed, reminding the council that they had recently agreed to hire a consultant to develop a plan for their downtown and another to help with historic preservation.
Councilmember David Lesser, the sole member to vote against the positions, repeated his warning that they “hadn’t brought the public along” with their decision and told the council to “bear that in mind as we approach future expenditures.” He said that the council’s discussion over how to pay for the new positions indicated that it was done too soon.
“Hearing this conversation about cuts after the fact just really bothers me, and I want to go on the record with that,” he said.
Nonetheless, the majority of the council seemed pleased on the whole with the OpenGov website, including Lesser, who called it “heading in the right direction.”
The quarterly update was a change from the midyear report that the city’s staff usually gives.
Moe’s presentation suggested that while the city would still have more revenue than expenses in its general fund in five years, that amount would be decrease greatly in that period of time if the city kept spending at its current level. For 2016, an excess of $1.21 million in the general fund was projected; for 2019, it was $140,000.
Lesser pointed out that while the city might make room for the positions in the budget in the meantime by holding off on some expenses, that it would have to absorb the extra costs in the long term.
Moe said he was correct.
“We eventually won’t be able to afford what I’ve assumed we’re going to be spending, or the revenues that we think we’re going to get need to be greater than what they are projected to be at this point in time,” he said. “You have tools to fix that–it’s just, I present to you, if you keep driving the car at 60 mph down the road, where are you going to end up?”
“Well, bingo,” said Lesser. “That’s my larger concern, obviously, it’s the larger picture of where we’re going in adding all these additional expenses.”
Ultimately, the council voted unanimously to order City Manager Mark Danaj, who proposed adding the four positions, to figure out how the city would pay for them by the midyear report in February.
