Pleasanton considering public safety cuts due to budget issues
On Tuesday night, leaders of one Tri-Valley city will be tackling similar budget issues to Oakland and San Francisco.
Pleasanton is seeing increasing costs and not enough revenue to keep pace. In November, a half-cent sales tax proposal to help close the budget gap was rejected by a 54-percent vote.
At Tuesday night's city council meeting, the newly elected council members will take the first steps toward addressing what could be a more than $100 million shortfall over the next eight years.
"Have you guys been in before," Wendi Shulte asks two women as they walk into her store.
She and her husband have been small business owners in Pleasanton for almost 10 years.
"We chose this area because it was one of the more safer areas to run a small business," said Schulte.
They own Good Common Sense Naturals – an all-organic skincare and bath store. They make all of their products in-house in an area at the back of the shop called The Kitchen.
"The biggest issue with any business is always safety. Safety for my employees and safety for my customers," she said.
That's why Schulte and others around town were concerned when they heard about some of the proposed cuts from the city administrator's office. The suggestions included more than $1 million in cuts to the police department, which included eliminating school resource officers and the K9 program as well as closing one of the city's fire stations.
"I think our community was pretty clear that public safety was one of their top priorities," said newly-elected Pleasanton Mayor Jack Balch.
He said cuts to public safety should be a last resort, but Pleasanton's budget issues aren't unlike many other cities. Across the Bay Area, most of the money from a city's general fund goes toward public safety, so it's hard to balance a budget without making cuts to those services.
"I think that our community, based on the election, has chosen leaders to do the hard work to decide if there's other things that can happen first," said Balch.
He also acknowledged the city is dealing with aging infrastructure which costs more to maintain, while at the same time, the cost of goods and labor has significantly increased while revenue has stayed fairly flat. The majority of the city's money for the general fund comes from property tax revenue.
Balch hopes the new Costco in Pleasanton will add sales tax revenue to make up for declining revenue at Stoneridge Mall where many of the anchor stores like Nordstrom have already closed.
For Shulte, she hopes the council looks at the budget like a business owner and tightens the belt before cutting critical services.
"That they've dug very deeply into this and there's no other choice, but is no other choice going to be for us to be sacrificing our safety," she asked.
The city council will decide at the meeting on Tuesday night whether to form a budget committee to gather input on how and where to make cuts. There won't be any action toward cutting the budget until the middle of next year.