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U. City council looks at options to balance budget
(by Jenny Fisher - May 27, 2009)
The University City Police Department plans to crack down on speeding drivers and motorists who don’t signal when turning, in hopes of reducing fatalities and serious injuries.
With the city council’s May 18 approval, the department applied for a $25,948 grant from the Missouri Department of Transportation as part of Missouri’s Highway Safety Program, which funds highway safety projects around the state. If approved, police would use the money to buy two new hand-held radar units and a laser unit and accompanying software, and to pay for police enforcement.
In University City, there were 94 speed-related crashes in 2008, according to the police department. One resulted in a fatality and 30 resulted in injuries. Though University City ranks very low on MoDOT’s list of municipalities with traffic accidents resulting in a fatality, the city ranks 36th out of more than 300 cities in the state for traffic accidents resulting in injury.
In the past, the University City Police Department has had four hand-held radar units and two laser units, but police say two radar units are constantly breaking and can no longer be used. The department would use the new radars and new laser to target drivers on Interstate 170, particularly where it intersects with Delmar Blvd., as well as several intersections along Highway 340. The police department’s goal is to reduce fatalities and disabling injuries attributable to hazardous driving by 2 percent.
While the police department seeks more funding, the University City council is moving closer to finalizing the city’s budget, which in draft form had a $1.3 million deficit.
At a May 14 meeting with city department directors, council members Terry Crow and Robert Wagner proposed a plan to balance the budget without using undesignated reserves.
That plan assumes the passage of a sales tax ballot issue estimated to bring in $240,000 and a revenue increase of $175,000 from a rental property registration program that would require all owners of rental property to pay a $25 registration fee so the city could create a database of rental properties. The plan also assumes a savings of $112,000 if vacancies are not filled when two police officers retire, and a savings of $120,000 to be created by reducing the number of streetlights in the city, among other things.
Balancing the budget, council members said, goes hand in hand with making a decision about whether or not to go forward with a grant application to the State Emergency Management Agency for a $4 million buyout of 26 homes on Wilson Avenue. Twenty-five percent of the money would come from the city if it were approved.
“There are three major items that we’re dealing with: It’s balancing the budget, it’s the Wilson Avenue project, and it’s a sales tax ordinance to put on the ballot,” Wagner said. “The idea is that these are so intertwined, we should bundle those [when making a decision].”
Council members Crow and Wagner have also suggested taking $100,000 out of the money brought in by the city’s economic development sales tax and using it to help pay for other city expenses in order to balance the budget, a suggestion that has raised criticism from University City residents at past council meetings.
At the May 18 meeting, council member Lynn Ricci said the money should go toward its intended purpose, development on Olive Boulevard.
“It is critical,” she said. “We have an economic development task board who has put out a proposed budget for this upcoming year, and one of the things that our current budget is attempting to do — and I feel very strongly that it is not an appropriate thing to do — is take $100,000 from that task and give it to the city.”
The city will hold an official public hearing on the budget in University City’s City Hall at 6:30 p.m. June 1. Council members hope to come to a vote that evening, although a final decision is not required until June 15.
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