Last Blog On Earth

The City of San Diego spends $4,671 per dealer to regulate gun dealers, but only charges $660 for the permit. It costs $40 to regulate pedicabs, but pedicab operators pay only $25 for a permit. And the city doesn’t charge anything to citizens who opt to pay their parking tickets online, though the web company that handles online payments charges $1.06 per payment. All of these disparities, and a host of others, are being presented to the City Council’s Budget & Finance Committee Wednesday as part of the city’s survey of user fees on everything from buying a copy of the City Charter to fire-safety inspections. If the full City Council approves all of the fee increases, they’ll add $7 million to the 2010 budget.

“I don’t look at this process of identifying how much we should charge with the services we provide as a way to fill the budget gap,” said City Councilmember Tony Young, who chairs the Budget Committee. “Even if we had tons of money, it would still be a good idea to raise fees.”

And the city certainly doesn’t have tons of money. Last week, Mayor Jerry Sanders announced that the 2010 budget deficit will reach $60 million. The mayor will release a budget proposal on April 13, but his chief spokesperson, Darren Pudgil, told CityBeat that Sanders plans to include the fee increases in that proposal.

The fee studies themselves go back to last fall’s mid-year budget crisis, when falling revenues forced Sanders and the City Council to combine cuts and one-time revenue sources to fill a $31 million budget hole. At the time, the City Council asked the mayor to examine user fees to see if the city is charging enough for its services. The studies do not discuss a storm water fee increase, which is not considered a user fee, nor do they tackle the question of making home owners pay to have their trash removed, since that would require a vote of the people. But if the question is whether the city is charging enough for services, the answer, in most cases, seems to be that it isn’t.

The vast majority of the fee increases ($5.43 million) are for police and fire departments services. Police, for instance, don’t always recoup what it costs to staff special events. The Budget Committee heard the fire department’s report two weeks ago, but tomorrow it will receive the rest of the reports.

Special events expenses are worth a separate note because they are complicated by contracts the city has with the Chargers, Aztecs and Padres. The city currently loses $2.2 million annually from home games played by these teams. The city can raise fees a little on the Padres and the Aztecs, but not at all on the Chargers, whose contract includes provisions for sharing costs, but not at higher rates. If the City Council approves new fees, Aztecs games will no longer be money losers, while the Chargers will cost the city $1 million annually, and the Padres, $700,000.

Sanders spokesperson Rachel Laing said the mayor supports the fee increases.*

“The council asked for us to bring forward full cost-recovery reports, and they are going to set fees where they deem appropriate,” Laing said.

Councilmember Young told CityBeat he thinks the fees have to be considered beyond their simple cost savings.

“I hear people say, you have to run the city like a business,” Young said. “Well this is not a business. There are other issues here beside market rate. We have to be very thoughtful as we go through each of these.”

These reports are pretty interesting; I’ll be back with more details as the week progresses.

*This sentence and the quote that follows were added to the story as corrections. The original sentence read, “The Mayor fully supports all the fee increases, and he hopes the City Council will pass them.” Laing indicated in a later e-mail that the original sentence overstated the mayor’s support for the fees.