In what seemed to some simply bad timing, to others a demonstration of influence peddling, and to others still a show of insensitivity, the Yucaipa City Council recently juxtaposed an appeal to its residents that they dig deeper into their pockets to demonstrate their civic pride with allowing their major political patrons’ company to up what they charge the city’s residents and businesses for an essential service by more than one fifth.
On June 24, the council voted to place on the November 5 ballot a measure calling for the imposition of a one cent per dollar sales tax override on all businesses within Yucaipa City Limits. The same night, those solons approved increasing by 22.1 percent the rates domestic and commercial customers will pay Burrtec Industries, Yucaipa’s franchised trash hauler, for trash collection.
In May, both Yucaipa City Manager Chris Mann and Finance Director Phil White informed the city council that they were projecting a budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2024-25, running from July 1, 2024 until June 30, 2025, of $7.2 million, given that the city had anticipated revenues of $35.7 million, and was slated to spend $40.1 million during that time, compounded by a $2.9 million shortfall in its fire fund. It was noted that Yucaipa collected roughly $2 million less in revenue than it spent during Fiscal year 2023-24, which ran from July 1, 2023 until June 30, 2024.
Mann and White indicating it was inadvisable for the city to continue on its deficit spending trajectory, laid out to alternative courses going forward, one consisting of reducing its expenditures by reducing municipal services and the other enhancing its revenue stream by seeking from the city’s residents the approval of a new tax.
At the June 10 Yucaipa City Council meeting, Mayor Justin Beaver, who is himself a public employee working for the City of Azusa, shot down Councilman Chirs Venable’s effort to have the city consider asking the city’s employees to make some wage concessions on their current contract or otherwise seek to impose a freeze or reductions on city employee wages in future collective bargaining sessions with the city employee unions.
Consequently, the council, which in addition to Beaver, numbers among its members another public employee, Jon Thorp, who works for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, voted to go forward with placing a ballot measure before the city’s voters at the upcoming November 5 election asking them to consider approving the one percent sales tax addition.
That vote will tax place four years and 8 months after the city’s voters in March 2020 primary election represented a measure calling for the imposition of a half-cent sales tax to be collected by all merchants within the city.
Mann, White and other city staff members, along with the council members maintain that the sales tax would provide Yucaipa municipal operations with a stable source of locally controlled funds to prevent millions of dollars in planned service cuts to police, fire, emergency response, and quality of life services. The economies that would need to be imposed if the tax does not fly with the city’s voters would extend to, they said, closing one of the city’s three fire stations and eliminating five firefighter positions in the city’s contract with CalFire, those being those manning that station; reducing the cost of the contract with sheriff’s department by $2 million, eliminating between five and seven patrol deputy positions; closing the senior center, saving $300,000; closing the Seventh Street Pool, saving an estimated $300,000; reducing Yucaipa Performing Arts Center programming that does not achieve full cost recovery, thereby saving an estimated $250,000; reducing community center programming, saving an estimated $250,000; identifying additional cuts to community service programs, saving $900,000; reducing net costs from the city’s development services division, saving $1 million; identifying and implementing $1 million in cuts to the city’s support services; freezing vacant any vacant non critical positions; and having the city negotiate with the Yucaipa City Employees Association a combination of furloughs or layoffs with city employees.
City staff and the council did its best to ignore and did not mention that the city was converging on its residents from multiple directions, increasing substantially the amount residents and businesses are to pay for trash service while upping the 7.75 percent sales tax shoppers in the city are already paying to 8.75 percent.
Also unmentioned by city officials was that Burrtec, through its owners Cole and Tracy Burr, are the major campaign donors to and political patrons of the city council overall.
Tracy and Cole Burr contributed $1,000 each to Mayor Beaver’s campaign fund on July 18 2022. That makes the husband and wife the major donors to Beaver’s electioneering fund.
Tracy and Cole Burr gave Councilman Bobby Duncan $750 each on May 15, 2020, making them/Burrtec the major donor to his campaign fund.
Tracy and Cole Burr gave Councilman Matt Garner $750 each on November 18, 2022, after he was elected to the city council earlier that month. The Burrs are not the major donors to Garner’s electioneering fund but rather the second largest donor.
As was the case with Garner, Cole and Tracy Burr provided Chris Venable with $750 each on November 18, 2022, after he was elected to the city council earlier that month. The Burrs are not the major donors to Garner’s electioneering fund but rather the fifth largest donor.
That the Burrs waited until after both Garner and Venable were elected before they acted to take on the status of their more prominent campaign fund donors suggests to some that the couple were seeking to purchase influence on the city council.
The city gave notice of the rate increase proposal by Burtec and that the council would consider the matter at the June 24 meeting. The city received 16 protest letters from city residents who objected to the trash rate increase.
On June 24, Burrtec Vice President Richard Nino said his company merited being able to impose the rate increase given that Burrtec had complied with California’s requirement that trash companies separate out organic, that is food, waste from the refuse stream. He said the company had upped its diversion of organic waste from the local landfill by 1,000 tons to “over 12,000 tons of organic waste that was diverted from the landfill, collected separately, and processed into compost mulch.” He said the company had further suffered a loss of return on its recyclable handling of 27 percent. The company had also picked up 3,400 bulky items that did not fit in trash bins from households in Yucaipa over the last year. Burrtec had been hit with an annual price increase of 3.48 percent since this time last year and that under the contract with the city it was therefore due to increase its charge to residents by 90 percent of that, 3.13 percent. Given all of the price escalations and profit losses the company is dealing with, the 22.1 percent rate increase is a fair one, Nino insisted.
The council went along with what Burrtec asked for.
While neither Nino, nor city staff nor the members of the council mentioned it, in the minds of some residents was the double whammy of trash rate increases and the expectation on the part of the council that residents will comply with their request that they up the tax the city will collect on retail sales. A few city residents remarked that the council seems to be oblivious to the financial impact the expense of government and the escalation of costs of basic services is having on city residents.