John sent this to council & staff earlier in the week.
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Mayor and Council
Oro Valley has conducted past professional management studies of some of its departments such as Building Safety, Public Works, Legal, and Library to provide a detailed analysis of how the Town compares to established standards and benchmarks of operations.
Management studies are conducted with the intent of utilizing an experienced and independent third party to review current strategies and operations and make recommendations to improve efficiency and delivery of services.
Two management studies of the Police and Parks/Recreation Departments had been approved and scheduled to commence in the summer of 2010.
The new Oro Valley Mayor and Council decided to eliminate those studies.
The following analysis on the Take Home Vehicule Program attempts to illustrate why any independent management study (analysis) can question the effectivemess of any governmental program and gauge how critical and/or costly it might be the community.
Please review the attached Take Home Vehicle Analysis.
I have also attached a sample audit that the City of Tallahasee Auditor performed on their Take Home Vehicle Program to see what the Commuting Cost and Depreciation Expense affected their budget. http://www.talgov.com/auditing/pdf/1001-takehomevehicles.pdf
Please make this email part of the public record
Questions about Commuting Costs related to Take Home Vehicles?
1. Does the Town of Oro Valley pay for all the driving costs (gas, oil, maintenance) for Take Home Vehicles? How much is this on a daily, weekly or monthly basis?
2. How much does the individual town employee share in the driving costs?
3. If the individual town employee does not contribute to the driving costs does the Town reflect this cost as an employee benefit for budget purposes?
Questions about Depreciation Costs related to Take Home Vehicles?
1. What effect does the take home cars have on the depreciation expense recovery for the vehicles (increased usage due to taking cars home may accelerate the depreciation expense so the extra wear and tear on the vehicle may cause the vehicle to be replaced sooner)?
2. Has the policy of Take Home Vehicles been fully vented to determine if this potential accelerated depreciation has caused more short-term expense in the budget?
2 comments:
John: I appreciate your tenacity in pursuing this information. However, beware of the "beast" as my public challenge to reigning in operational costs in the OVPD was completely whitewashed by the Chief and some other citizens in the community. I sense that there is no tolerance within the OVPD staff for opinions and/or questions by the citizens who pay thier salaries.
Once again, I'd like to thank Mr. Musolf for his analysis. I'd be interested to know if he got any response from the town.
I think it's very sad that Oro Valley is cutting services to residents (see the letter in today's Explorer regarding cuts to recreation programs). At the same time, they're providing taxpayer-funded vehicles for employees who don't even live in the town. They're providing a salary of $171,480 plus benefits for a town manager who then uses taxpayer dollars to throw parties for her bosses who were fired by the voters (spending the money outside of Oro Valley, against council policy). They're providing a salary around $100,000 plus benefits for a town clerk who can't even do her job of answering citizen requests for information.
The previous commenter partially answered the question that has been asked on this blog before: why do people only comment about the parties, and not about the police department or storm water. I do understand that we pay property taxes to the county, and part of those taxes deal with storm water infrastructure. We also pay an additional fee on our water bill every month that deals with storm water. So yes, I would be very willing to discuss the storm water budget if they were overspending what we are already paying for, but that doesn't seem to be the case right now.
But as the previous poster hinted, it is likely that we citizens (and those we have elected to represent us) have completely lost control over the budget when it comes to the police department. They will show up in droves, armed and in uniform, to protest any question of their budget. It's all about public safety, every penny, they will tell us.
Well, I'd like to suggest that keeping the swimming pool open is a public safety measure as well. It's far better for our children to swim in a supervised environment during the summer than to swim unsupervised at a friend's house.
Ms. Watson suggested in her Explorer interview that the council will be reviewing tax increases soon. I think they have a lot of work to do making real, necessary cuts, and providing services to those taxpayers that they want to continue to tax.
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