Salt Lake City officials embark in earnest this week on setting spending priorities for 2018 and how to fund them, as the City Council begins to parse a long wish list of $144 million in potential outlays.
That list includes millions for repaving roads, hiring new police officers, buying new police cars, funding affordable housing programs, reversing years of deferred maintenance on parks, implementing transit and transportation improvements, maybe even budgeting for a new east-side police precinct.
No one in City Hall is suggesting that all of that will get funded — maybe not even half.
But, for perspective, consider that raising that $144 million through a property tax hike alone — if state tax law even permits it — would more than double city property taxes, adding $560 to the $479 now due on a $250,000 home.
The wish list, reviewed by City Council members at their annual planning retreat last week, breaks down into $84 million in annually recurring expenses — for example, salaries for new officers and ongoing costs of street maintenance — and about $60 million in one-time costs, such as the new precinct (a $10 million project) or capital costs for various parks and recreation improvements, such as $2.5 million for repairs at Smith’s Ballpark.
What are some other items? Projected ongoing public safety costs, including 50 new police officers and new vehicles, top $12 million. Deferred maintenance on the city’s overall vehicle fleet and annual capital improvement costs approach $18 million. Affordable housing programs could come in at $5 million, transit service improvements at $7.7 million. And the total outlay for repairs to streets, utility lines and other public services could run $33 million, $20 million of which is paving.
“We asked for an exhaustive list that represents current outstanding financial needs,” City Council Chairwoman Erin Mendenhall said Friday. “Some of those are critical and time sensitive, and others are not yet fully known and have patience built into them.”
Starting this week, the council will look to weigh those needs against the financial burden on residents.
“We take the impact side of this very seriously,” Mendenhall said.
What are the priorities?
Council members emerged from their retreat with a list of budgeting priorities that included “curb-to-curb” street maintenance, public safety outlays, and affordable housing and transit plans approved last year. The following day, in her State of the City address, Mayor Jackie Biskupski posed similar priorities, along with ways to pay for them: a proposed sales-tax increase and a big new bond.
The city could borrow as much $87.5 million to cover one-time expenses this year if the public approves, at an annual extra cost of about $5 per household, she said. As for recurring expenses, a sales-tax increase of a half-penny, from 6.85 percent to 7.35 percent, could bring in $35 million.
When Salt Lake City was chosen as the site of a new prison in 2015, the dubious, unsought distinction came with the Legislature’s burden-easing blessing authorizing the city to increase sales tax. The mayor, then a candidate, decried an apparent quid pro quo under which the city got the taxing authority in exchange for taking the prison.
“Let’s be very clear here,” she said at the time, “even if you might be willing to discuss the idea of a sales tax increase, you don’t get the tax unless you take the prison.”
In 2016, when the state threatened to take the tax option away, Biskupski lobbied against the move, even as she said she had no plans to impose the levy. In her 2016 budget message, she called for public input “before we move in that direction,” adding the city at the time didn’t even have “a strategic plan to utilize this tax option.”
‘Now is the time’
The city now has both a strategy and a need, the mayor said in her annual address. Salt Lake City has “a robust transit master plan, a housing plan, and an in-depth understanding of our infrastructure needs.”
With all that and a clean air plan to boot, “now is the time for us to fully invest in the future of Salt Lake City,” she said, pledging “an outreach campaign to gauge the public’s interest” in boosting sales tax.
“I have consistently said, both as a candidate and as mayor, that any tax increase should only come after robust public engagement and with plans in place,” she said later in the week. “With a housing, transit, clean energy plan, along with a deep understanding of our infrastructure needs, now is the time for us to go to the public and hear if they are ready to invest in the capital city.”
The proposed tax hike has generated virtually no hue and cry. City Council members gave it an initial thumbs-up, although 1st District Councilman James Rogers said the revenue should go exclusively to his area, because that’s where the prison is going.
The 2015 sales-tax option was “a mitigation tax for the prison, and that’s what it really needs to be used for,” he said last week.
Council members make the case that the sales tax is a fairer way to spread the cost of items such as street maintenance and public safety in a city whose population doubles on weekdays from commuters, students and other visitors.
Another advantage: Visitors don’t vote.
