By Curtis Bortle
By now, everyone is aware of the troubles currently impacting our local pool governed by the Honey Lake Valley Recreation Authority Joint Powers Agreement. Fortunately, due to recent action taken by the Susanville City Council, the budgetary woes will be avoided, and business can resume as usual, for this year. What is troubling to me, and much of the community I have spoken to, is that a long-term solution for the pool’s financial future has not been secured since its inception.
For what it’s worth, the founders of the JPA set the 15-year term to give the pool time to establish itself and to pursue the formation of a special district, which could create an assessment to fund future operations.
It was never intended to have either the county or city bureaucracy to operate or control the pool. Once the HLVRA was created, both the City of Susanville and the County of Lassen agreed to allocate $80,000.00 (each) towards its operations totaling $160,000.00. Add the revenues made from swimming lessons, pool attendance, etc. ($143,780.00) and you have $303,780.00 in annual money available, assuming no major changes.
The annual operations of the pool are $279,994.08.
Again, assuming there are no major changes, which is highly unlikely, annual inflation will eventually put the community right back at the bargaining table fighting over where to pull the extra money from to keep our kids in the water. That is exhausting.
I would like to propose a solution. Long term, sustainable, able to keep the community swimming while not raising anyone’s taxes. This is my personal position and does not reflect the opinion of the City Council as a body.
First and foremost, long-term there needs to be a Special District established. In order for any such district to exist, it must have funding. Most Special Districts use property taxes or property assessments for their funding. To do so would require a vote of the populace residing within the boundaries of the district with a “yes” vote requiring 66.7% of voters to pass. This is a tall task, and it pits people’s monthly expenses against recreation in the community, which is not a fun position to put people in.
Instead of creating the Special District, and raising property taxes, I propose we form the Special District and the City of Susanville, and the County of Lassen enter into a tax sharing agreement that utilizes the new property taxes from the new Truck Stop to fund the Special District. Between new property tax assessments and new sales tax assessments there are significant new revenues for both the City and the County.
When valued at the current estimate of $50 million, this new revenue would total $149,248.00 ($76,939.00 worth of new property taxes from the County and $72.309.00 worth of new property taxes from the City). Add the revenues from attendance, swim lessons, etc. and your new budget is $293,028.00. The school districts as well will be gaining a significant amount of revenue from property taxes.
If the school districts wanted to assist with their new revenues, they could easily cover the cost of the High School swim season. I would further suggest that of the new sales tax generated by the truck stop, the City and the County allocate $60,000.00 to bring our total new budget for the pool to $353,028. The new property tax assessment would also scale year over year with a 2.5% increase, allowing the new budget to keep pace with rising operating costs.
And if it doesn’t get any better, the new revenue from the Truck Stop won’t impact the City or the County’s current budgets.
Having a funded independent Special District would allow for more community control. Although with the proposal I have laid out it is unlikely, if there were a need for any additional revenues, the Special District would be able to go to the ballot for itself.
In summary the community would gain: A Special District with a board community members could serve, long term sustainable funding for the pool, and savings to both the City and County’s budgets because both of their $80,000.00 contributions will be no longer required.
All told, this proposal accomplishes all the benefits of the pool and alleviates the pain and worry over which parts of our existing County and City governments to cut to make sure our community and swimmers get to enjoy our pool for years to come.
