Aberdeen, in its financial state, is looking for a utility tax increase.

The city is in debt and it needs a spark from somewhere.

Ruth Clemens, Aberdeen’s city administrator, pointed out how the last utility tax increase that Aberdeen implemented was in 2014. The tax would be raised from 2% to 4.5%. The council made a motion for Clemens to bring back an amendment to the utility tax that would increase the tax, which will be brought forth in a first reading at the next city council meeting on Oct. 9. The second reading would include a public hearing on Oct. 23.

“Cities use our taxes to fund operations, and this is one of those taxes that funds operations that includes all general-funded operations,” Clemens said. “(Including) police, fire, parks, community development, court. So this is one of those taxes that cities use to do that, to operate.”

Clemens pointed out Hoquiam’s utility tax is at 15% for water, sewage and stormwater utilities, Cosmopolis is at 13% “and so on and so forth down to Ridgefield, which is at 8% across the board.” Of the comparable cities used to compare to Aberdeen, Ridgefield, Anacortes has the next lowest utility tax at 7% across the board.

“We have a $3.5 million deficit that we’re trying to face, is we bring in about $968,000, is a 5% increase, which would be approximately $6.20 to the utility bill,” Clemens said.

Clemens said the city is “making as many cuts as we can as we’re looking at the budget.”

“We are making targeted cuts,” Clemens said. “We are making revenue changes. We are already loaning out, or selling our police services to the city of Cosmopolis. We’ve signed a contract with fire marshaling services. We are trying to increase revenue everywhere that we can. And on top of it … we have reduced sales tax. We have a lot of taxes that have dropped in the last year.”

Impact on city’s departments

Lisa Scott, community development director, spoke about some of the hot-button issues facing her department through 2024.

“Over the last year in particular, almost every council meeting … the complaints we’ve been getting have been on loitering, homelessness, drug use, parking and garbage. Those are the main big things, those are all general fund activities that are supported by the general fund,” Scott said. “Some of the impacts we’re looking at are to the police … we need to be mindful when we go through this. I think that those are the areas that we’re trying to combat the most and those are the areas that are subject to some of the bigger cuts. And we’ve already made a lot of cuts to our proposed budgets. … And it could impact services just because if we don’t have enough manpower to be able to respond to those, which we have been doing, it’s just a concern. I know you guys have heard a lot of that over the last year, couple years in particular, and those are your biggest areas of complaints.”

Public Works

“With regard to cutting services, there’s no way that we really can do that,” Rick Sangder, public works director, said. “If we’re going to reduce the general fund hit to the street department, that comes at the cost of maintenance work. Maintenance work is from the general fund. What we’re proposing is to take more of our (Transportation Benefit District) dollars and do more capital construction, which (are) sidewalks and roads. We’ll be doing more.”

Sangder spoke about one aspect that will affect public works.

“Right now I have two guys in downtown every day, picking up carts, picking up garbage and blowing the alleys. That’s what they do all the time,” Sangder said. “I don’t know if people notice the difference but I’ve noticed a difference. What’s gonna change is we won’t be able to do that because we won’t have the funding source to pay for that. I just want to adjust expectations since I think we’ve gotten used to things being better and looking cleaner. When I removed those guidelines, I just don’t have the bodies to do it, but I got it.”

Arrests

“Every time that a person gets arrested for a trespass charge, it costs the city from start to finish a minimum of $16,000 to get him from the processing all the way to the end,” said Dani Smith, Aberdeen’s human resources director. “If they’re appointed a public defender (that’s) up to $24,000. So we had nine per day, lately. That’s just something else that impacts the general fund.”

Police

“I’d also like to comment on our budget,” said Dale Green, Aberdeen Police Department chief. “Our budget is 49% of the general fund, so it’s by far the biggest part of the general fund. As most can understand, we’re generally not in a revenue generating mode. That’s really not what the police department does. We don’t get an opportunity to bill people for our services very often other than when we’re helping Cosmopolis or something like that. We brought in over $300,000 in grant material for our department every year, unfortunately that’s not something we can rely on on a year-by-year basis. So when the budget process started, I was asking for a couple of options, just like the rest of the directors, somewhere … 5% or 7% for us. Realistically, for the police department, that’s just people.”

Green said the department doesn’t have a lot of overhead.

“You’ve all seen our police station. A quarter of our police cars are used vehicles, we’re running kind of bare bones as it is,” Green said, before he went into vacancies.

“What that looks like right now is as we struggle to try to fill those positions is some things already are getting cut,” Green said. “We don’t have a traffic officer any longer. He predominantly handles police calls now, 911 calls for service. Those are kind of extra positions that we would love to have and be able to if we could fill all our positions, but it’s really kind of a challenge right now in this current market. It takes us a year from the day of hire to get them trained and on the road. That’s another lack we have as an agency, it takes so long. (And) it costs $103,000 from the day we offer someone a job to the day they are police officers. That takes a long time, a lot of money and tremendous investment. That’s something we’re asking to consider too. If we’re looking at a major cut to our budget then we’ll have to sit down with the council, decide what priorities are and look into what services we might have to not respond to.”

Parks

Stacie Barnum, Aberdeen’s parks and recreation director, said the department heads are not “fluffing our budgets with a lot of extra purchases.”

“We really have, through the years, been taking a look at our budgets,” Barnum said. “We’ve cut things from our budget each year. Myself, I was asked to cut 5% from my budget. There are things that are out of my control that have increased. For example, five years ago, the parks department’s portion of liability insurance was about $17,000. This year, it was $68,000. And that’s with the parks department having average or below-average claims. We also now have to pay water and sewer. Fortunately we passed the new irrigation rate. That’s probably going to save $60(,000) to $80,000 dollars. But the spray park, that’s not an irrigation rate. Just to run the spray park one month is $8,000 for our water bill that we didn’t have two years ago. There are things that are increasing in costs. And as Ruth pointed out, we’re way behind the other cities in collecting the taxes we need to cover the costs for the services and operations that we provide.”

Fire

“The fire department, we are a little unique. As you recall we do have a few budgets, we work out of the general fund fire and EMS,” said Dave Golding, Aberdeen fire chief. “Again, just like the police department, we’re not very revenue-heavy … we can’t really shift personnel over into EMS because of how the rate structure is built, so our hands are tied in that respect there. And looking at our budget, we are mainly personnel, so we are looking at having to really reduce … services outside of our mandated stuff as a fire department. Really, what that means is public education and training. Those are going to be my two things that I’m going to have to do without. When we talk about the public education and outreach, that includes the summer fire program. We can’t afford that. That is a lot of manpower and overtime to run that program. Programs in the schools will suffer as well.”

Clemens said the city has been “hemorrhaging” money.

“For those of you who aren’t aware, when there are events downtown, the city hasn’t been charging for all of the public works workers who have to go in and close down the streets, all of the police officers that are provided for that, that’s a service that we provide,” Clemens said. “Those are the types of ways that we’ve been losing money.”

Clemens said it’s been about giving back to the community.

“Now we’re coming back and saying we would like to continue to offer those things to the community, but this is the only way that we can do it,” Clemens said. “We would have to raise taxes in order to make sure we can continue to provide services and programs, and those little luxuries.”

Council comment

Liz Ellis, Aberdeen city councilor, wanted clarification that the 5% increase would raise the tax from 4.5% to 9.5%, would put Aberdeen in-line with Centralia, but that it would be “well-below Cosmopolis and Hoquiam.” Clemens confirmed that was right.

Stan Sidor, Aberdeen city councilor, brought forth the motion to have a first reading to increase the utility tax by “less than 5%.”

“Obviously we didn’t increase the EMS utility rate, and it costs a certain amount of money just to operate and run the business of the city,” Sidor said. “The revenues just aren’t keeping pace with the costs of what it costs to operate the city. I know people don’t like to see tax increases, but it costs money.”

Aberdeen Mayor Doug Orr, who’s for the increase, said “I really want us to have a balanced budget.”

“I think we’ve been feeding off of money as a city that really … eventually we’re gonna run out of money, this can’t go on forever,” Orr said. “If you go to the store to buy a candy bar and it’s $1, they’re not gonna let you pay with 60 cents and then put in the rest. Eventually someone’s going to have to pay for the candy bar. I saw what happened with the EMS. What I see is we tend to be so worried about our few who can’t pay this increase, that we’re allowing the whole city to not pay the increase when we should be voting in these increases. We have to be fiscally responsible, we can’t just willy-nilly run around spending money.”

Contact Reporter Matthew N. Wells at matthew.wells@thedailyworld.com.