11:55am | The Long Beach Budget Oversight Committee voted 2-1 Wednesday to ask the City Council to direct staff to research the potential cost savings of no longer providing street sweeping services in-house.
The discussion leading up to the vote indicated city officials are well aware that street sweeping tickets not only cover the service’s cost, but also yield sometimes handsome amounts of surplus funds.
Committee Chair Gary DeLong and member Suja Lowenthal cast the supporting votes, with member Patrick O’Donnell dissenting.
“Essentially, I just think in today’s times we need to be looking at everything we possibly can to either save money or improve service levels in the city,” said DeLong, who placed the item on the committee’s agenda.
“This is one of many things that we can do so I think we should be having the Council direct city staff to go out and solicit bids and see if there’s any area to improve our street sweeping operations.”
Street sweeping services are currently provided by the city through the Environmental Services Bureau, and the program is budgeted for 18 full-time personnel, though it is currently operating with 17. The sweeper operators are paid between $18 and $24 per hour.
DeLong said in a March 9 memorandum that as of that date, street sweeping expenditures for Fiscal-Year 2011 were $3.05 million, while revenues were $3.27 million.
“Street sweeping is self-sustaining and revenue generating,” the memo reads, “due to mutually dependent parking enforcement operations.”
Lowenthal queried the potential cost savings should the city cut back its operations and sweep streets once every other week. Staffers told her that it was determined two years ago that doing so would cause the cost to jump.
This increase in cost to the city would result from fewer vehicles being ticketed for violating posted parking restrictions. Currently, the millions of dollars the city rakes in with street sweeping tickets covers 100 percent of the cost of street sweeping services and results in some surplus revenue that is deposited into the general fund.
Staffers said that the surplus revenue — the money that is left over after all costs associated with providing street sweeping services are covered — generated by street sweeping tickets averages any where from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than $1 million annually.
DeLong suggested that the city’s policy be reviewed in terms ticket fines.
“There’s also a larger policy issue here. Although we do generate revenue by writing tickets that cover the cost of the service … on the other hand, is that really a good public policy to say ‘let’s fine our residents so that we can cover the cost of street sweeping?’
“If you only swept the street half as often, we’d have less fines, but there’d be more happy residents,” DeLong continued. “At the policy level, do we really want to fine our residents to cover the cost for service (if) it’s questionable (that) we need to do it so frequently?”
Later in the meeting, however, he asserted that contracting out would only be favored should it result in the city’s earning more revenue, whether it be in the form of ticket fines or decreased operational costs that would result in savings.
“We at least need to do everything we need to do today, plus provide additional revenue to the city, plus provide additional benefits,” he said. “Otherwise it just doesn’t make sense for us to look at it.”
DeLong cited a number of Southern California cities that have in recent years ceased providing their street cleaning services in-house, and each has experienced both a reduction in cost and improved customer satisfaction, the latter of which is measured by the declining rate of complaints, he said.
The cities of Newport Beach, Glendora, Pomona, Lakewood, Bellflower, Downey and Carson all use contractors to sweep their respective streets, according to the memo.
Much of the cost-savings factor lies in employee compensation. DeLong cited a recent USA Today article that reveals California’s public sector employees are paid significantly more than their private sector counterparts, the result of public employees’ compensation increasing 28 percent above the inflation rate from 2000 to 2009.
Janet Shiavo, a representative of the Machinists Union, noted during public comments that should the city contract out street sweeping services, 16 full-time employees would lose their jobs.
The committee will recommend that the long Beach City Council direct city staffers to determine if hiring a contractor to sweep the city’s streets would be beneficial to the community and meet a number of goals, including reducing costs, maintaining or improving customer responsiveness and satisfaction, boost accountability and transparency and the implementation of a 100-percent green fleet. Lowenthal also requested that staff be additionally instructed to research decreasing the frequency with which the streets are swept.
While Long Beach’s current sweepers operate on compressed natural gas and are considered environmentally friendly, DeLong stated that there are machines available today that are even cleaner.
The City Council last month approved a request by Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske to direct staff to research the benefits of installing automated licese plate recognition cameras onto street sweeping machines to eliminate the need for parking officers to trail them throughout the city.
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