In the following clip, from the Feb 24, 2010 council meeting, City Manager Cotton and long-time Council Member Bond admit to not following their policy of putting major "expenditures"/bonding to the vote of the people. The Council had agreed to the policy because the Encinitas Taxpayers Association had prepared to run an initiative to make that policy law.

Here is the policy that was nixed by the current council. Here is the entire agenda item.

Here is the 1993 letter from the Encinitas Taxpayers Association that motivated the City Council to adopt the policy of letting the voters decide on long-term debt. Here are the minutes from the 1993 council meeting.

Last month the ETA ran a campaign to alert the city about the relationship between the water district and the City of Encinitas. Click here for the campaign background.

Here are some of the public comments from the Council Meeting.

The whole meeting can be viewed here (Feb 24, 2010).

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Supervisor Slater gets credit for donating toward the Cardiff statue. She didn't donate to the statue, the taxpayers did.

The NCTimes gave the Encinitas City Council a rose for not giving the CM a raise.

The 'Fiscal Responsibility' award

A rose to the Encinitas City Council for voting against a proposal to give Encinitas City Manager Phil Cotton an 11 percent raise.

If the raise had been granted, Cotton's base salary would have increased by $21,859, bringing his overall annual compensation package to nearly a quarter of a million dollars. That's a lot of money to run a city of only about 60,000 people.

The NCT editorial is a little misleading. The Council never voted. Watch this series of videos to see how it went down.

Stocks' comments make it clear that he was supporting the raise.

Stocks just voted to give a hefty raise to the SANDAG director two months ago. The UT reported,

Gary Gallegos, executive director of the San Diego Association of Governments, would see his $240,000 annual base salary grow by $50,000 over five years under a recommendation due to reach the agency’s board of directors tomorrow.

Barth was already on record against a raise and during the meeting Jim Bond made these statements.

Stocks' position was not going to win. Watch how Barth moves for a vote against the raise, Houlihan fails to second the motion, Stocks finds a way to avoid a vote, and Mayor Dalager pushes on to the next agenda item without a vote being taken.

These two public speakers stayed around for hours to speak. It is worth watching. One of them is a city council candidate.

To watch the entire meeting go to the March 10, 2010 video here.

A city could play accounting games by moving regular staff to one of the city's proprietary agencies. The proprietary agencies charge consumers at a rate consistent with the cost of delivering the product to the ratepayer. The agency is under no obligation to constrain costs or maximize efficiency.

There is no built in mechanism to watch out for abuse of water districts/department and their ratepayers. Ratepayers' only real option is to file Prop 218 protests at the next water rate increase.

According to an OurLA investigation, the City of Los Angeles is balancing part of its general fund budget by shifting 70 workers to the water department. In doing so, some staff automatically jump to a different pay scale and get a 40% raise.

During the last Encinitas budget adoption the City of Encinitas quietly transferred 3 city employees to the San Dieguito Water District.

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NCT No raise for City Manager
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/encinitas/article_ea6eb707-64e5-5a23-b392-74eb8fd09f3c.html

UT Council and Manager Up for Raise

Dalager and Houlihan voted to raise Council Member's salaries 10%. The vote to raise City Manager Cotton's compensation 11% (to $242,640) has been delayed until March 10th.