What happens when city wallet empties

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BY DEENA WINTER / Lincoln Journal Star

A few minutes after returning to his office one day, Karl Fredrickson’s coworkers asked if he’d noticed the ruckus outside. He looked out a window and saw a street light pole lying across the street at 13th and L.

Wind had toppled the steel pole into the street during rush-hour, right next to a crosswalk.

The city’s former public works director knew why it fell: Street light poles are rusting from the inside out, and so while a new paint job made it look like perfectly sturdy, the truth came crashing down that day.

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A driver avoids the pothole in the middle of the road at 14th and Calvert. (Robert Becker)

“It’s just amazing somebody wasn’t under it,” Fredrickson said.

For Fredrickson, it was a stark reminder of what it’s like to live in a city with a tight budget.

“The infrastructure’s aging — all of it,” he said. “And maintenance budgets haven’t gone up.”

Aging infrastructure doesn’t mean much to most people — unless they’re in the path of a falling light pole or crossing a bridge that collapses.

This year marks the fifth the city has wrestled with multimillion-dollar budget shortfalls. The booming 1990s — when the city enjoyed double-digit increases in sales tax revenue and city officials happily dropped the city property tax levy — are over.

While the overall city economy seems to be in reasonably good health, with plenty of “help wanted” signs, the amount of revenue coming into city coffers has not kept up with costs.

Mayor Chris Beutler says that’s because the budget is structurally out of whack. He says the city is running out of gimmicks — one-time tricks to plug budget holes  — and it’s time to pay the piper after enjoying 45 percent drop in the city property tax rate since 1993.

Now that sales tax growth has slowed to a trickle, he says, it’s time to raise property taxes. In the proposed budget he released last week, he suggests a one-cent hike.

It’s that, Beutler says, or more budget-tightening.

Even though the average Lincoln homeowner pays more for basic cable TV than for the city’s share of property taxes, elected city officials will generally do just about anything to avoid increasing the unpopular property tax.

And with four City Council members indicating they aren’t inclined to raise taxes again, this summer promises another round of budget cuts or one-time fixes.

The city is not broke; it’s just having a hard time making ends meet. Lincoln has an excellent triple A bond rating, and unlike many cities, its debt load is modest, its police and fire pension fund are more than adequately funded, and it doesn’t have huge looming retirement and health care obligations.

But as the city struggles to meet its budget needs, bond rating agencies will take a closer look.

“All people need to do is drive down the streets and see the condition of the street to see that things are not being kept up anymore,” City Budget Officer Steve Hubka said.

The sidewalks might have a 2-inch lip that can cause a stumble.

The cops might not get to a call right away, because they’re understaffed and run from call to call.

Firefighters might not respond as quickly, because the city can’t afford to build new fire stations to serve new areas.

And those rusting streetlight poles? The city is lucky if it can afford to replace one per year.

Here’s what happens when in cities with tight budgets.

Street repairs lag

Lincoln has $56 million worth of street improvement projects waiting to be done within the city limits, from street widening to extensions that would reduce traffic congestion and bottlenecks.

Beyond the city limits, officials estimate they need to build $150 million worth of new streets in the next six years to accommodate growth.

But aside from nine blocks of South Street, the city hasn’t resurfaced an arterial street since 2004. It spends between $2 million and $5 million annually to resurface streets, compared with the $13 million to $15 million city officials say it would take to keep streets in reasonable condition. Some streets that could have been saved with a mill and overlay treatment have deteriorated to the point they need more costly repairs. Sort of like a car whose owner neglected to change the oil, and is now looking at an engine overhaul.

Parks get shaggy

If it seems like the trees could use a prune and parks are shaggier than normal, that’s not just because of the wet summer.

Trees in the right-of-way and parks are now only pruned every 16 years rather than 10, due to budget cuts in recent years. Jerry Shorney, assistant director of park operations, said they really should be pruned every seven years.

And the weeds and grass in parks are a lot higher in some places.

Until about three years ago, the city mowed 2,300 acres of parkland; now, about 210 of those acres are mowed once or twice a year. The remaining acres are mowed about every 14 working days, and trimming is done about every third mow, as opposed to every mow in past years.

Some people like the wildflowers and native grasses that attract wildlife and songbirds in these manmade prairies. Others, not so much.

“There is a mindset that we should mow all our properties to look like a golf course,” Shorney said. “But when we’re dealing with 2,100 acres of property… obviously we don’t have that kind of budget to do that.”

There are also about half as many trash barrels in parks as there used to be, and two park restrooms were shuttered to save money. The remaining restrooms are open about a month less than in past years and when they are open, they’re cleaned and stocked less often.

In addition:

* For every three street trees removed by the city due to disease or damage, only one is replaced after the city’s tree program was cut from $50,000 to $10,000.

* Kuklin Pool closed this year (partly due to expansion of nearby Antelope Creek for the Antelope Valley public works project), and the mayor is proposing to end city funding of the Meadow Heights Pool. Three of the city’s 10 pools are pretty modern, but most of the others date to the 1960s and need updating and repairs.

* What was once a fishing pond and skating rink at 14th and Lake streets sits unused, in part because it’s no longer worth it to the city to spend $1,000 to fill it and risk a winter too mild to freeze the water.

* Few of the city’s 76 tennis courts are well-surfaced, aside from the Woods Tennis Center. Plans to upgrade them have been shelved.

Cops on the run

Lincoln would have to hire 131 police officers to have as many, per capita, as Omaha.

The department spends more tax dollars than any other, but its force of 317 police officers for a city of 242,000 is small compared with similar-sized cities.

Police Chief Tom Casady would have to hire 46 officers today to get to his goal of having 1.5 officers for every 1,000 residents. He’d like to add four officers per year to get to a more typical staffing level, but he hasn’t been able to do that since 2000.

That leaves less time for preventive police work and follow-up work. And it means police don’t respond to hundreds of people every year who suspect their neighbors are dealing drugs. The city’s 15 narcotics officers focus on the big cases.

Police used to help people who locked their keys in their cars, broke their ankles playing softball, or totaled their cars in private parking lots. Not anymore.

They no longer respond to gas drive-offs unless the store gets a license plate number.

The forensics lab and records unit have such backlogs the city has stopped processing evidence in many misdemeanor cases.

And police officers get less training. Funding for it was cut in half about a decade ago, and has been frozen for much of the past decade. The city spends less than $75 per employee for training, which is enough to pay for only the most vital training needed for certification.

That means Lincoln officers aren’t staying up-to-date on crime fighting and technology.

“Our technological edge is starting to evaporate,” Casady said.

He can’t afford to put video cameras on all cruisers, buy digital cameras and Tasers for all officers, or replace the 1930s police garage or canine facility.

And as for the 30-year-old police uniform, the city doesn’t have $350,000 to replace them.

60-year sidewalk backlog

At its current pace of $1 million a year, it would take the city 60 years to make all the repairs necessary to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Lincoln has struggled to keep up with sidewalk repairs since voters forced the city to take over sidewalk maintenance in the mid-1990s.

Public works officials would like to spend more like $4 million a year on it.

Dispatchers under the gun

The city is down to bare bones in the 911 center, employing as few 911 dispatchers as possible.

So when someone is gone, the remaining dispatchers are forced to work overtime.

In staff meetings last spring, dispatchers were in tears, saying they never know if they’re going to get to go home when their shift ends, or whether they’ll have to work another four to eight hours.

If more dispatchers are cut, it would be “crippling,” city officials say.

Firetruck purchases on hold

The city has four aging ladder firetrucks, which are instrumental in rescuing people, but can’t afford to buy two more the fire chief says he needs. Not at nearly $850,000 each.

The chief also would like to build new fire stations to better serve new areas of the city and improve response times.

Now, he can’t even afford to replace the roof and siding at Fire Station 12 at 2201 S. 84th St., where one side of the building is sinking and the garage bay is so narrow side doors on firetrucks can’t be fully opened to check equipment.

What now?

The city budget officer likens Lincoln’s financial situation to people having a hard time paying their monthly expenses and dipping into savings to make the payments — while living in a paid-off house and not having much credit card debt. What do they do?

“Get a second job,” he said.

But what does a city do? Some people say it cuts the budget or raises taxes.

City Councilwoman Robin Eschliman says while it gets harder to balance the budget every year, she’s not sure there’s no more fat in the budget, given the fact that performance audits have not been done for years. This year, an audit board will change that.

“Until you get that cranked up and going, how do you know?” she asked. “Until we go in and do some auditing, I don’t know to what extent our backs are against the wall.”

It’s hard to tell for sure, unless you look a lot closer.

From a distance, things don’t look so bad. You might not even notice the potholes in streets, the cracks in sidewalks, the rust inside streetlight poles.

But many of those poles are about 30 years old — about the same age as many of the city’s traffic signal poles. And although officials would like to replace about 15 traffic signal poles per year, it doesn’t have the money to replace more than about one a year.

So the poles get repainted.

“Paint can cover up a lot,” City Engineer Roger Figard said. “When things rot from the inside out, you don’t know until it’s time for it to go down.”

Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.