A New Proprietor for the North Beach Concession

Low bid contracts are generally a useful government tool, but it is not a tool that is always a good idea to use.

If the North Beach concession is mishandled there will be a lot of disappointed people and it will take a while to correct the errors.

“Leave Well Enough Alone” is probably the best policy there. The extra $10 or $15K the City might get from the concession is minor in comparison to the money wasted elsewhere in it’s $80 million budget. And bringing on problems at North Beach won’t be worth it.

The City wastes millions in upper level bureaucrats.

Making money off of business enterprises is not a government forte.

New Tax Payment Schedule

The room for cutting taxes at the city level is at the top of the bureaucratic food chain; for example, getting rid of the City Administrator.   But governments never consider cutting out those high level paper shufflers.   Cuts are made at the lower level where productivity takes place.

The current example of this practice is the proposal to get rid of a couple of clerks by reducing taxpayer payment dates from four to two.   An earlier similar suggestion was to reduce garbage collection to every other week to save on labor costs of garbage collectors.

The city would save $75K on the tax payment date proposal.   If the City had dumped the unneeded City Administrator and assistant Park and Rec Director as was suggested last year during the budget debates, then instead of hiring a new DPW Chief Administrator this Spring, if either one of the capable Deputy DPW Administrators had been promoted to the position (no need to replace him at his old position), it would have saved the taxpayers about a half million dollars in wages, health care benefits and pensions.

There are millions more in savings available without having to cut services or increase taxpayers hardships.   But to find them, you have to look at the top of this over-staffed city bureaucratic nightmare.