Beaumont Must Stop Living in the Illusion that Kapanicas Created
By: Libi Uremovic | Original Article at patch.com
Every government agency in California is given more than enough tax revenue to properly operate and Beaumont is no exception. Beaumont’s financial problems are primarily the result of violating California State Laws and giving away the taxpayers’ money.
TASK ORDERS:
To prevent corruption; California Public Contract Law requires competitive bids open to the public for any project over $10,000. To circumvent State Public Contract Laws the City of Beaumont issues ‘Task Orders’.
A task order is a daily or weekly ‘to do’ list that an employer would gives an employee. The City can give a task order to a maintenance worker to change a light bulb and mop the floor, but the City can not gift an $800,000 task order to design a bridge.
The City also can not ‘pre-approve’ contractors. Every contract must be put to public bid for every project.
The City of Beaumont has been using task orders instead of public contract bids since the early 2000’s. This one violation of State Law allowed the pillaging of hundreds of millions of dollars.
POTRERO INTERCHANGE:
The City has been talking about building an overpass on Highway 60 for over 10 years. Originally it was supposed to be a County and State project because cities do not have the funds to construct state highways. Once the State and County refused to entertain the Potrero Overpass the City of Beaumont declared they would ‘go it alone’.
Including the $819,000 the current City Council gifted on March 17, 2015, the City of Beaumont has spent $13 Million on Potrero with nothing to show for it. The City could have built and funded two fire stations with the money wasted on Potrero.
The City of Beaumont’s roads are all severely deteriorated and were never expanded to accommodate the population. It is ridiculous and incredibly irresponsible that the City continues to use Potrero as an excuse to funnel money to Urban Logic when the City can’t maintain the roads inside their city limits.
MITIGATION FEES:
Mitigation Fees are also known as Impact Fees. They are the fees paid to cities by builders to pay for the additional costs the city will incur, whether it’s housing or commercial growth.
Housing is a secondary market. Staff profited from Bond sales, so they only focused only on building houses without ever establishing a primary market. Beaumont’s housing market was at capacity by the early 2000’s, but Staff still wanted to profit from bond sales, so they started making deals with developers to allow them to build without paying mitigation fees. Failure to properly collect mitigation fees is the basis of the $60 Million TUMF Lawsuit.
Records show that Beaumont not only gifted TUMF Mitigation Fees to developers, but have also been gifting the City’s mitigation fees for over a decade in order to entice developers to build houses in Beaumont when there is no housing demand. This has not only flooded the housing market and severely depreciated home values in Beaumont, it has left the City without any funds to provide infrastructure.
The City must charge developers enough mitigation fees to provide the infrastructure needed to accommodate the additional houses. Urban Futures included $6 Million in mitigation fees in the City’s 2015/2016 Budget Revenue, but the $6 Million has to be removed because the City already approved reimbursing the developers for all of their mitigation fees.
GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES:
“The death of Capitalism” is how one person described government subsidies for the Chamber of Commerce. Runner up was the night the Tea Party stood before Council to thank them for the free building use, free police, free staff, and free equipment use. Honorable mention goes to the marble graveyard and Castaldo’s use of police to direct traffic when Xmas vomits on his house.
Taxes are collected to provide essential services, not to subsidize the private sector. Along with cash, the City also gives away city employees’ labor. The Police Department’s salary is a major part of the budget, but the police officers and other city staff members are repeatedly used at private social events.
Three months past the start of the Fiscal Year and the City of Beaumont can not produce a budget, not because taxpayers do not pay enough to provide services, but because Council has given away all of the money. It is time for everyone to ‘pay their fair share’, and that includes Developers, Charities, and the Beaumont Chamber of Commerce.