A Few Charts That Make It Clear Where Much Of Sierra Madre's Tax Money Has Really Been Going

One of the more malodorous fallacies contained within the city's ballot argument favoring the passage of Measure UUT is what I call the Hostage List. It is made up of the more beloved portions of this town's governmental agency, those that the City Council would like you to believe will be ruthlessly thrown out into the streets and under the wheels of the next empty Metro bus should you decide against voting to raise your utility taxes. These include the Library, Community Services, Recreation (is that an actual department?) and, of course, those perpetually heroic part-time Paramedics. Without whom you will die a lonely death some dark, stormy and unfortunate night. Or so certain heavily invested parties have suggested.

It is a veritable laundry list of fine community institutions, each with a city issued knife held to its exposed throat in lieu of more of your tax money.

Here is how the City's fallacious ballot argument nonsense goes:


Robert Fellner ofTransparent Californiafame has generously prepared a series of charts for us that detail where your money is really being spent, and where it isn't. And despite what you might have heard, most of the increased spending has basically gone to just one place, that being the Sierra Madre Police Department.

When you consider that the UUT rate has been pretty much been stuck at 10% for years (with the exception of the last 6 months when it inched down slightly to 8%), you'd figure that expenditures would have also stayed level. But, of course, they didn't. If they had the city would not be facing the deep financial trouble it is dealing with now.

The reason the City of Sierra Madre is in the deep money hole it is today has little to do with a 2% utility tax cut spread out over the last six short months. Instead it is that steep and steady rise of public safety expenditures, in particular those for the Sierra Madre Police Department. As you will see from this first chart, while all other expenses have basically stayed level, public safety costs have increased yearly.


This next chart breaks it all down for us by detailing the various categories. Again we can see that it is public safety that has grabbed increasingly larger chunks of the city's budget while everything else has been mostly stuck in place.


So who are the main culprits in all of this? Certainly the largest by far would have to be CalPERS. And for whatever the reason, Sierra Madre is now paying a lot more for its very expensive Police Department's retirement plan than anything covered by a similar program from the County of Los Angeles. An important consideration because LA County retirement costs have actually gone down recently, while Sierra Madre's CalPERS payments continue to increase yearly.