A handful of city departments and divisions proposed fee changes and increases to the Santa Barbara City Council Finance Committee Tuesday, which is scheduled next week to decide what budget recommendations to send to the full council.
The Golf Division, Waterfront Department, Water Resources Division, and the downtown parking program’s proposed changes, which would take effect July 1 if approved, concern the city’s enterprise funds, which come from fees and service charges charged for services including public parking, golfing, and storing boats in the Santa Barbara Harbor.
The Finance Committee has been examining parts of the city’s fiscal year 2017 recommended budget. The year’s projected revenues are lower than expected, prompting, in part, greater examination of the city’s funding needs.
The Golf Division, which oversees the Santa Barbara Golf Club course, is not changing any of its fees, said parks and recreation business manager Mark Sewell.
He added, however, that the city will now be receiving the gross revenue for all of the services that were previously provided under contract with the current golf course concessionaire — services such as car rentals, use of the driving range, and club rentals.
At the harbor, the Waterfront Department plans a 2 percent increase in its slip rental fee — the fee for renting a boat parking spot — to help fund renovation of the harbor’s Marina 1 area.
The department also plans to raise its “liveaboard” fee from $140 to $150 per month and increase the cruise ship fee from $5 to $7 per passenger, a fee that won’t be charged for crew members.
The city’s water resources manager Joshua Haggmark proposed adding a fee for damage to the city’s water system infrastructure intended primarily to ensure that contractors are more careful when working with the infrastructure.
Another fee is proposed for developers who have the city review and inspect the water system.
The downtown parking program plans to update its fee schedule to better address current parking needs, said principal transportation planner Rob Dayton, with monthly parking fees facing the most changes in light of increased demand.
Parking for a month in most downtown lots is slated to increase by $5 to $10.
A $100 fee would also be assessed for the city to clean a parking refuse enclosure, and fees for using parking space for staging construction equipment would be charged per day to ensure that the construction companies are using the space more efficiently.
Additionally, fees for parking between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. would go away, with Dayton citing the fee removal as an incentive for inebriated parkers to not drive home.
And starting Jan. 1, annual residential and visitor parking fees, thousands of which are issued each year, would rise from $20 to $30. The goal, Dayton said, is to avoid misuse — chiefly residents collecting an overabundance for their visitors.
After the proposals, the committee heard a handful of funding requests from local organizations.
The Coalition Against Gun Violence asked for a $20,000 one-time request for a 2016 or 2017 gun buyback event. The past two years’ events have yielded 444 collected firearms, said a coalition representative.
Visit Santa Barbara, a tourism-promotion organization, asked for $150,000 in annual funding for ongoing services, and Downtown Santa Barbara requested a one-time $33,700 check for maintenance services.
Two homeless housing organization asked for their own one-time funding requests: PATH Santa Barbara, which now oversees the Casa Esparanza homeless shelter, asked for $125,000 and the Landlord Liaison Partnership wants $50,000 for a transition house program. PATH Santa Barbara served a little over 700 people last year, CEO Joel Roberts said.
Glenn Bacheller of Social Venture Partners, which helped found and fund Landlord Liaison Partnership, said the program was a promising new way to tackle homelessness.
“This is a game-changer; this is moonshot type of program,” he said, adding that in its six months in Santa Barbara, private landlords have helped 24 individuals.
The County of Santa Barbara requested $22,186 for its 211 Helpline program. County assistant CEO Terri Nisich explained that the number was proportional to what other county cities would pay in terms of the distribution of residents who use the service.
The county itself has been footing most of the bill. The hotline received 5,200 calls last year, she said, 36 percent of which were from Santa Barbara.
Additionally, the Santa Barbara Youth Council asked for a one-time $8,000 request, and the Beach Erosion Authority for Clean Ocean and Nourishment (BEACON) requested an ongoing sum of $4,500, which amounts to a 30 percent increase in annual dues currently paid for by the Waterfront Department.
Ray Ward, chairman of the Chumash Maritime Association, finished up the meeting by requesting that the city waive the annual fee for maintaining tomols, the Chumash’s plank-built canoes, at West Beach, an ancestral village site of the Chumash.
After expressing their appreciation for the work the organizations do, the committee acknowledged that the city’s current fiscal climate made meeting all the funding requests a difficult job.
“We’re doing what we can to accommodate the need for more services in town in light of a shrinking pool of resources,” Councilman Jason Dominguez said.
“We need input not just on where we can add more money to the budget, but definitely where we can cut money from the budget.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.