This is Maureen Cavanaugh . What is infrastructure. That is the question that the city Council has to answer as they consider a change to the San Diego city charter to infrastructure. Councilman Mark Kersey has made the proposal which he says will generate $45 billion toward infrastructure over the next 30 years without raising taxes. A Councilman David Alvarez says that timeframe is too long. And he has proposed an alternative plan including increase property to speed up repairs. Joining me San Diego Councilman and David Alvarez. John member welcome. Thank you. Councilman Kurt speak, city attorney, Jack Goldsmith asked the city Council to be quite specific and its definition of infrastructure before they propose a change to the charter. How are you going to determine the definition? We will have a Council meeting within two weeks on the interest you of the infrastructure. We will have a working group at the city attorney's office as well as independent, the mayor's office and come up with a definition that is, the goal and broad enough to include inks that need to be included, but not so poor that anything the city does is considered infrastructure. From the standpoint of where we are today that would include streets roads, sidewalks, storm drains, bike paths, traffic lights, and of course city building, libraries, parks, etc. The goal is to get that definition concise. And that was the point the city attorney made yesterday. We need to make sure the money is being spent were needs to be spent. Do you see Councilman Kersey cobbled these funds be used only to repair infrastructure that exists or in building new infrastructure like sidewalks that do not have any? It needs to be both. The city attorney was trying to get that up assisted a. And we began this discussion talking about at the deferred maintenance. My colleague Mr. Alvarez, made a great point. If we happen area that is missing a sidewalk or never had one, is that considered deferred maintenance, it may not. Technically is a new capital project. We need to use this money to pay for it. And we having David's district, and we need to make sure that the things that the people expect us to pay for, can be paid for out of this fund it and we will make sure that that definition includes it hurt and you expect billions to be generated in the long-term from this change the charter? What about the short term within the next 10 years? The short term, tens of millions are not hundreds of millions. It really is an issue and David brought this up as well, the capacity of how many projects the city can deliver. This has been a source of frustration for the last three years and for the mayor as well. We need to get more projects out the door, quickly. And we are better than we were 3 to 4 years ago, but we are still not where we need to be. Mr. Alvarez brought this up and a couple of our other colleagues, budget analyst made this point, that we really need to do a better job with project execution and delivery. And what my proposal does, as we are wrapping up that capacity, money gets brought in under the rebuild San Diego proposal. We will not be bringing a bunch of money and next year, we will be being hit over the next 5 to 10 years and doing those repairs in a very, understandable way, certain way over the next few decades. This is a decades long issue. We will never solve infrastructure as this is a core function of what the city is supposed to do. We can solve the deferred maintenance backlog, but the issue of ongoing maintenance will always be a function of what the city supposed to do. Now Councilman David Alvarez, Councilman Kersey says tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions with the next 10 years. Do you think that we need to go faster than that? I absolutely do. You just have to look at the city departments projection of the needs of the things that we set to date. There is a 1.4 million within the next five years alone. Independent budget says it's the same. With that type of in need. We need to start looking at a plan that is a little bit more aggressive that brings in a little bit more money. Understanding that Mark well pointed out, we have not been completing these projects. And we need to do them faster any plan that we commit to, over the long-term, whether 10 to 20 years, the to make sure that we increase the ability to get those projects built, and also increases the amount projects that we can get bill as there are so many needs. Councilman Kersey of revenue and his plan from extra revenue that the sales tax and the general fund will be heading over those years. Where does your plan get its revenue? The revenue from the typical sources of where we get our revenue, sales tax, hotel tax, and from taxes that everyone pays. We will get the money no matter what. What I'm saying, we want to be aggressive and actually close that gap, the I think proposes and falls behind in closing that $1.4 billion gap cow we need to look at our revenue stream that is larger. Property taxes are potential to get more funding from there. And of a little bit more stable, stills -- sales tax tend to dip. Property tax not as much. I think at the end of the day it is about how much money we want to set aside and how much we want to get done. And what the $1.4 billion problem I think that we need to make sure we are aggressive in setting aside a lot more money over the next five years. And beyond that hurt both of you gentlemen have talked about the city needs to get better at using the money it already has to get these infrastructure repair projects in the pipeline and actually get them done. Quickly if you could, can you tell me both a starting with you Councilman Kersey, how will that happen? Is something we have a certain number of city engineer and project managers who are dedicated getting these projects done. We need more of them to start with. Because when you are talking about capital budget that will go from roughly 350 when you are talking about capital budget that will go from roughly $350 this year, to well more of that next year, and is projected in the mayor's five-year to be more than $500 million each year for the next five years, we need more people we can ask Billy execute the project. Now what we are finding that it is difficult to hire these people because we are hiring but so was the county and the core in all the other cities got not to mention the private sector heard and frankly there are not that many good civil engineers out there. We may need to get created if we find, we put money in the budget this year at the maze of quest to hire more public works people to get these projects done, but a lot of the top time is hiring them. If we find out one year from now or even six months from now, that we cannot get those folks hired, we will get to need to be more creative in how to get these projects done. It will not be acceptable. And I think David would agree with me, to go back 12 constituents and say look, that the money but we cannot spend as we do have the bodies to get the projects of the door. That is not acceptable way for the city to run your family to be up to correct it. And Councilman Alvarez should that be in par parcel of any plan to actually either people are going to be completing these projects? Absolutely. And that is exactly what pointed out the proposal. Whatever it is that we say we will bring in terms of revenue, data be ready to put the money to use. Over the last three years, we have done a lot of fixes to the system itself. But clearly it has not been enough we gave those positions to the mayor, this year and they have not been fully hard. We have to do more and we have to be more aggressive and we have to tell people clearly, this is what you should expect. We will basically be sequestering this money for infrastructure. And we will spend it because this is how we will do it. This is what will be accomplished. We need to attach a specific goal when we hire people, find out how many more projects can we put through when we give you 100 people. We did not do this and that is something that we must going forward at Councilman Chris spent how with this be addressed again? The capacity issue? I am talking about you talked about yesterday defining infrastructure and perhaps putting of proposal to change the city charter? It will come back on February 9 in about two weeks and we will have a discussion about the additional scenarios from the independent budget analysis, as well as the definition of infrastructure. And when I think we have a good starting point from that. It will have that discussion in a couple weeks. And simultaneous to the city attorney will be working on crafting the initial bout language, and I will come back as well. In the Council take a bow on putting that on the June 7 ballot hurt I want to thank you both. San Diego city Councilman Mark Kersey and David Alvarez. Thank you both very much.
The City Council on Tuesday directed the City Attorney's Office to develop language for a proposed ballot measure that would set up a method for funding infrastructure projects in San Diego over the next few decades.
Councilman Mark Kersey's "Rebuild San Diego" plan would amend the City Charter to dedicate future sales tax growth and money from reduced pension payments toward neighborhood upgrades, including streets, sidewalks, storm drains, parks, libraries, recreation centers, and police and fire stations.
In addition, it would preserve half of all new major general fund growth over the next five years for infrastructure projects — formalizing a commitment made by Mayor Faulconer in his first two budgets.
The money dedicated by the measure would close a gap in funding for fixing billions of dollars of neglected roads, sidewalks, municipal buildings and other city facilities that have been ignored until recently.
Kersey, his Infrastructure Committee and the mayor's office have spent the past couple of years trying to figure out the scale of the problem, and to streamline the city processes meant to deal with the issue.
"When my team and I first began putting together this measure, we agreed on one overarching goal — to never let the city's infrastructure get this bad again," Kersey said. "We realized pretty early on it would not be good enough to just invest in new projects or to just close the deferred maintenance gap, because as we now know, simply building new projects doesn't break the cycle of deterioration, which is how we got in this mess in the first place."
The plan doesn't include a tax increase — so if it goes on an election ballot — possibly in June — it would require only a simple majority for passage.
Faulconer has endorsed Kersey's plan. It also received conditional support from the city's independent budget analyst and San Diego County Taxpayers Association, but both have suggested tweaks.
The City Attorney's Office is scheduled to return Feb. 9 with draft language, at which time the council will determine whether it wants Kersey's plan to last 20, 25 or 30 years. Kersey initially proposed 30 years, but several council members expressed a preference for a shorter time frame.
The City Council has until early March 11 to decide whether the proposed measure will actually go on the ballot.
On Monday, Councilman David Alvarez proposed an alternative plan that he said would raise $800 million over the next 10 years with a combination of higher property tax revenues from new projects, debt service savings and use of general fund savings.
Alvarez said his plan would help neighborhoods get needed upgrades faster and reduce the city's long-term debt. He said he would ask for his idea and others from the public go before the Infrastructure Committee before the council takes action on Kersey's plan.
