Once again, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to James Tamm and his loyal sycophant, Kevin McQuillan. They are two of almost a dozen of the city’s attorneys involved in my FOIA case, all of whom were responsible for turning a simple request for records into a five-year court battle costing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. These two deserve a special shout out because they are apparently obsessed with monitoring me as I exercise my first amendment right to criticize my government (just as James Tamm billed the Michigan Municipal League Liability and Property Pool for monitoring my husband’s Facebook page before Richard won his Open Meetings Act lawsuit against the city).
Moving on.
If you’ve been following my commentary on Clarkston Sunshine, you’ll see that I recently posted informal minutes from two city council meetings – August 24, 2020 and February 8, 2021. I didn’t plan on posting them close in time; it just so happens that I’m going forward and backward in order and worked on both of these summaries one right after the other. Reading about what happened at these two meetings together frankly made my blood boil.
Fiscal Irresponsibility
Let’s start with the August 24, 2020 meeting (unofficial meeting minutes linked here: http://www.clarkstonsunshine.com/august-24-2020-city-council-meeting-held-virtually/).
There were two discussions during the August 24, 2020 meeting that you should be aware of. First, there was a presentation from Independence Township’s DPW Director, Dave McKee. Mr. McKee explained that all Oakland and Macomb County residents would be responsible for sharing in an $84,000,000 cost to repair the Oakland-Macomb Interceptor Drain. The repairs are necessary because the system is in very bad condition and we can’t allow it to fail. Clarkston’s share of the repair cost is $98,921.06. Better managed Independence Township paid its share – and ours – out of a budget surplus, and the city council was told that we needed to reimburse Independence Township. (The reimbursement was authorized at a later meeting.)
Every water and sewer bill that you’ve paid over the years was slightly higher than the actual costs for these services. Your excess payments gradually accrued as surplus funds inside of the water and sewer accounts (they are two separate accounts). The purpose of having those pools of our money available is so that the city is able to pay for any necessary water and sewer-related expenses as they arise. So, it shouldn’t have been a problem to reimburse Independence Township for the $98,921.06 that we owed them out of our sewer fund.
But we didn’t have the money to do that. Do you remember why?
Let me refresh your recollection.
Our city council forced us to pay for a city hall and DPW expansion – whether we wanted it or not (and they knew that most of us didn’t want it). I personally believe that our city government avoided authorizing necessary repairs and maintenance on city hall to bolster the argument that the building needed to be expanded and updated in a major way.
The first time that the city council tried to push the city hall/DPW expansion through, the taxpayers revolted with a petition signed by 116 residents, emails to city council members, a lawn sign campaign, and two mass mailings sent to Clarkston residents that were financed by concerned citizens. That first proposal failed. The second time, the project was repackaged as a “community project” and shoved through quickly, despite the city council members knowing that the taxpayers didn’t want our money spent this way.
The city manager and city council claimed that with donations of labor and materials from local businesses (the “community” aspect of the project), they could accomplish the rebuild for $300,000 – even though it admittedly would have cost only $48,000 to do the repairs that were necessary, something the city manager characterized as the “do nothing option” during his community project marketing presentation. (FYI, the $300,000 didn’t include, for example, $24,557.01 in interest, the salaries that we paid DPW employees to work on the project rather than other things, professional fees, the $50,000 driveway that we just put in [excluding engineering charges], or the $46,363.11 that they wasted trying to unsuccessfully push the first city hall/DPW expansion project through.)
I wrote about this fiasco here: https://www.clarkstonsecrets.com/dpw-city-hall-expansion-the-zombie-that-refuses-to-die/, here: https://www.clarkstonsecrets.com/yolo-you-only-live-once-the-tale-of-a-community-project/, and here: https://www.clarkstonsecrets.com/yolo-you-only-live-once-the-tale-of-a-community-project-part-2/
We didn’t have the money to actually pay for the “community project,” so the city council raided, er, “borrowed” from the surpluses in our water and sewer funds. And they didn’t just “borrow” a little – they took the whole $300,000 out of the water and sewer accounts. While I appreciate the work that our city employees do and it frustrates me that they are underpaid, the primary reason that is the case is because the city manager and city council prioritized this very expensive “community project” over everything else the city should be doing – including taking care of the people who handle the day-to-day city operations. They thought it was better to spend over six times more than would have been necessary to simply repair and maintain our city hall building.
And now we have an actual emergency use for these sewer funds. (Apparently, the city council was unaware that emergencies can be a thing when they spent the money.) In order to pay Independence Township the $98,921.06, the city has had to shift the internal “community project” loans around (transferring the debt to the water fund so that the bill could be paid from the sewer fund). Taxpayers are now required to “reimburse” the sewer fund, which means that your $117.42 quarterly sewer bill will increase to $162.02 for the next four payments (one year’s worth of bills), as discussed in the February 8, 2021 city council meeting (unofficial meeting minutes linked here: http://www.clarkstonsunshine.com/february-8-2021-city-council-meeting-held-virtually/). So you have to pay more for sewer service because the city effectively spent the money that was in the sewer fund on an unnecessary city hall expansion.
Does the city care that you have to pay more for sewer service now? If you run a restaurant, the city council cares very much about you. Not only will they gift you with the free use of the end of a city street and free use of greenhouses to expand your seating capacity, they also won’t even consider asking anyone driving to Clarkston for the privilege of eating $14 burritos to pay a mere $1 an hour for voluntarily parking in the more convenient municipal parking lot. The city council considers that to be so much of a burden that they suspended paid parking for over a year and have no plans to consider reinstating it until at least mid-April. (FYI, we used to use this parking money to pay for needed street, parking lot, and sidewalk repair.) But if you’ve lost a job or income during the pandemic, that’s not as important as these transient strangers. In fact, the sewer bill increase was callously referred to as just a “cost of doing business” at the February 8, 2021 city council meeting. So, suck it up, buttercups!
A Financial “Windfall”
Another thing happened at the August 24, 2020 city council meeting. After learning that we owed $98,921.06, and knowing that they’d created a problem by raiding the water and sewer funds, the city council discussed what they were going to do with a $57,165 “windfall” available from the close out of several “special assessment districts” (SADs).
SADs are generally used by municipal government to force property owners in a specific geographic area to pay for an improvement or benefit in that area of the municipality. For example, if one of our streets had a gravel road that the city wanted to convert to concrete, the city could set up a SAD to force the residents on that street to pay for the new street. There are a lot of hoops required to set up a SAD, including mandatory public hearings to give the people who will be forced to foot the bill for the improvement an opportunity to express an opinion about whether they want their money spent this way.
If there’s money left over in a SAD after the improvement is paid for, that means that these taxpayers overpaid for the improvement. It would be rather neighborly of the city council to give the money back to the property owners who paid more than the actual cost of the improvement. Or, the city council could decide to keep the extra money and put it in the general fund. Because why not, right?
I’ve attached the April 27, 2020 resolution closing out four special assessment districts. The resolution briefly describes the history and transfers the entire $57,165 into the general fund. (Reading the full history of these SADs would make your eyes glaze over.)
So let’s recap. It’s August 24, 2020. The city council had just learned that we owed $98,921.06 to Independence Township, and they knew they had $57,165 from the four SAD closeouts sitting in the general fund. Taxpayers Robyn and Cory Johnston suggested applying the money to the $98,921.06 bill from Independence Township. Taxpayer Chet Pardee suggested that the money be used on road maintenance.
Did they do that? Of course not. Silly you for even thinking that they would. You should know better by now.
So what did they do instead? They decided to spend $33,000 on signs. Why? Well, here are some of the reasons offered:
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- Our signs look old
- It would add a “great visual” at a time when we are trying to attract businesses and it makes Clarkston appealing to support them
- The signs keep the look and feel of our community
- They wanted to do something “uplifting and positive” for the residents
- They will improve the look of the city
I hope that you feel “uplifted and positive” about the fact that your next four sewer bills are going up by 38%. I’m sure that you didn’t have any use for that extra money anyway, and you should just accept city council knows what’s best for you. After all, focusing on local businesses is far more important than your family budget (even though local businesses pay only a small fraction of Clarkston taxes – most taxes come from the residential property owners like you).
It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t add that not every city council member thought that blowing $33,000 on signs to make local businesses feel better was a good idea. Sue Wylie, Jason Kniesc, and Al Avery all voted no. On the other hand, Eric Haven, Joe Luginski, Ed Bonser, and Gary Casey chose buying new signs over easing the burden of the $98,921.06 sewer charge or paying down the city hall/DPW expansion debt.
The Sanctimonious Chutzpah of our City Council
If you’re angry about all of this, then you probably shouldn’t listen to the February 8, 2021 city council discussion about going forward with the sewer bill increase. I think we all recognize that we have a $98,921.06 bill that has to be paid, and if we are going to be stuck paying for it because city council thought that a city hall/DPW expansion was more important than paying for things that would benefit the local taxpayers, then it’s better to spread out the payments over four months.
The sanctimony . . .
No one expressed the least bit of remorse over their role in creating the problem that we have now. Instead, they talked about changing the language in the resolution because it was “too soft” – rather than saying that the city council was accepting the recommendation of the auditor to tack the $98,921.06 debt onto the sewer bill, Luginski wanted the resolution to say that the council was directing the city manager to notify you that your sewer bills were increasing.
They also talked about whether there should be a public hearing to go through the math and allow taxpayers the opportunity to voice complaints or concerns so that no one would think the city council was trying to “sneak” anything through. In the end, they decided that they don’t need to hear from us. There’s nothing we can do about the charges, the bill must be paid, and they’ve talked about it at several city council meetings (that I’m sure most of you don’t pay attention to because you are busy living your lives).
The chutzpah . . .
The worst and most tone-deaf part of the meeting was the discussion about annually reviewing and potentially raising the water and sewer rates. After all, we need to consider that pipes depreciate in the ground and have to be replaced. And, of course, we never know when a catastrophic event will happen in the future. So, maybe the solution to that is to raise your bills to . . . wait for it . . . build up surplus funds in the water and sewer accounts so that we are prepared for these contingencies.
And now we’ve come full circle. We had surplus funds in our water and sewer accounts. City council couldn’t stand to see that money just sitting there, so they “borrowed” it to use on a project that the taxpayers had expressly rejected. And you know what? There is absolutely nothing to stop them from doing it again. So, I think that before the city council raises our water and sewer bills by even a penny to build these funds back up, we are entitled to demand an ordinance that expressly prohibits any city council from using surplus funds that accrue in the water and sewer funds for any other purpose.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Our city council has demonstrated that they simply cannot be trusted with water and sewer fund surpluses. We need a local law to prevent them from ever robbing from them again.
So much that can be said about this, much of which has been said to the city council only to be ignored.
Some critical points directly related to this are that no one has established what the reserve funds should for city water, sewer, roads, etc. They want to raise enough money to get the sewer fund back to where it was but is that enough? Is it too much?
To pay the sewer bill, the city transferred the loan for the city hall to the water fund which is now significantly depleted. Robbing Peter to pay Paul and they know no more about the water fund than the sewer fund. As I recall, the city manager stated in a public meeting that he had no idea what these funds were for.
I have commented frequently on the city hall project because it was, and continues to be, a disaster in planning, design, financing and implementation. It was never a $300,000 project, as they like to tell us, that’s just the amount they borrowed. It has cost well over $400,000 and it is still not complete. Currently none of it is open and usable by the public that paid for it.
While the current pandemic was unforeseen, it is interesting to note that the city hall has been closed to the public for about a year and there have been no public meetings in the new meeting room. The city also found out at the few public meetings that did occur, that the room really doesn’t work. The city was informed of this, and other problems, prior to construction but as with many things, they refused to listen. Now we have a public building, surrounded by dirt and mud, that the public cannot use and yet the city appears to be functioning as well as ever. Was this and the many other discretionary expenses we are forced to pay really the best use of public funds?
I’m sure the discussion will continue, it’s just too bad that no one in the city government is willing to listen.