You just know there had to be someone who mentioned to Mrs. O’Leary that perhaps the lantern was a little to close to her twitchy cow.
Looking in on the budget doings at City Hall this week, I can only guess that there are a few people at 333 Ocean Blvd. that may sympathize with the way Mrs. O’Leary’s precognitive neighbor felt after the Great Chicago Fire.
After all, it was revealed this week that the city is $20 million dollars in the budget hole this year, will be $37 million in the hole next year, and nearly $10 million the year after that. And this is after $17 million in cuts and fee increases contained in the current budget.
I just have to hope that a bunch of the lower-rungers at City Hall will scratch their heads this week as they pass their manager’s office and mutter, “I told you so.”
But, unfortunately, status-quo government seems built on two precepts: first, that anyone incapable of a job will eventually be put in charge of it, and second, that common sense is a liability.
It reminds me of what the great Satchmo once said. “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”
Just substitute “common sense” for “jazz” and you see my point.
Hanging on to last week’s theme of common sense, I would like to offer up another example of how everyday sensibilities could probably do a world of good for the executive office suits at City Hall.
This week’s tale of Bizarro City Hall begins with the City Council’s unanimous approval of a small item at Tuesday’s meeting—and I call it small only in reference to the apparent concern of those on the dais as the item was approved with no discussion—that provides nearly $1.3 million in taxpayer and taxpayer-funded bond money to construct a new Aqualink water taxi dock alongside the Belmont Pier.
For those that don’t know what the Aqualink is (and judging by their ridership numbers, most people don’t), it is a catamaran passenger ferry that shuttles up to 75 people at a time between Alamitos Bay Landing, the Aquarium and the Queen Mary. The new dock would become a fourth stop on the service, which runs seven-days a week during the summer and only on weekends the remaining eight months of the year.
On the surface, there appears to be nothing illogical about providing greater public access to a service that can bring more tourists and visitors to such overwhelmingly successful Long Beach destinations as the Aquarium and the Queen Mary (pardon the sulfurous stench of sarcasm).
Scratch the surface, however, and you’ll realize that the project is only missing an introduction by Rod Serling.
Now bear with me here while I turn on the Example-O-Tron: Let’s say that sometime during the summer you or I suddenly realize that the air conditioner compressor in our ten-year old car needs to be replaced. The repair bill is a whopping $750.
Then you think, wait a minute, this car already has 110,000 miles on it, the muffler is going out, the brakes chatter like Flipper on helium, that funky spilled-milk smell never went away and to top it off, that damn check engine light mocks you every day with its glowing amber grin. You smile, thank the repairman and get back in the car, rolling down all the windows and wishing for winter.
This is common sense. If the little money we have is not worth investing, we don’t do it—we roll down the windows.
In City Hall anti-reality, however, the windows don’t even have handles.
Submitted for your approval: based on statistics from the United States Department of Labor an Aqualink boat captain and deck hand should earn a combined salary of about $100,000.
Now before any city budgetarians out there get all verklumpt about my calculations, let me point out these are rough estimates and I am not factoring in benefits (and plus I can’t find my Gene Autry Budgetarians of the West decoder ring anyway).
Another thing to consider is the operational costs of the boat. According to the most recent city audit of Long Beach Transit (way back in 2006), the hourly costs of running one of the water taxi boats is $14.03 per hour. The Aqualink normally operates about six hours a day, excluding the time at dock. Multiplied out by the Aqualink’s 184 day a year operating schedule gives us about $15,000 a year in operating costs (and this is not factoring that fuel in 2006 cost about half what it does today, but we’ll let that also go for simplicity’s sake).
So just a rough calculation tells us that it costs about $115,000 a year to run the Aqualink vessel.
Now if the vessel had a full 75-passenger manifest on each trip, and based on 14 trips a day times the annual operating schedule, that would give us just over 193,000 passengers a year handled by the Aqualink.
If you back up slightly, you will notice I said “if.”
According to the LBT audit in 2006, the Aqualink and the two smaller Aquabus water taxis combined accounted for only about 39,000 passengers in 2006 bringing in about $90,000 in passenger fare revenue.
Even if we assume for argument’s sake that all of the revenue was from Aqualink, the service is already losing money.
So this brings us back to the new dock at Belmont Pier. Let’s assume that the new dock rocks so hard that it brings enough new passengers above the current levels to fill the Aqualink boat on every trip to the Pier, or an additional 55,000 passengers a year (five stops per operating day). These passengers are paying $3 per fare. That’s an additional $165,000 a year in revenue.
The problem is, the city is paying $1,273,160 for the new dock (not including a potential $190,000 contingency amount). At $165,000 a year, it will take the city nearly eight years just to recoup the investment.
Another way to look at this is to think that for the same cost of building the new dock, the city could subsidize the reduction of the Aqualink fare to $1 per trip (at the current level of passengers) for nearly 16 years. Or, eliminate the fare and make it free for nearly 11 years.
Since the overall goal is to increase travel to the downtown and Queen Mary areas, what do you think is going to have the greater impact on Aqualink usage? Free rides or a additional stop (at the end of a pier) for a highly unsuccessful service.
Did I just say “highly unsuccessful?” Well, if you consider that the maximum potential capacity of the Aqualink vessel per operating year is just over 193,000 passengers, and based on the most recent information available, the vessel is carrying at the most 39,000 passengers a year, my handy dandy calculator says the service is operating at just over 20 percent capacity. That means just under 80 percent of the service’s capacity is not being used.
Given the perpetual City Hall cries of being on the eve of a financial Ragnorök, it seems odd that any development project that can not show a major return on the investment is even being considered.
Even one as “small” as this.
How long will it take before City Hall realizes that it’s 100 degrees outside and time to roll down the windows?
Oh, and by the way, the lantern? It really is way too close to that twitchy cow.