Medina has an unsustainable spending problem. The city spends too much on skyrocketing employee costs, legal fees, and employee settlements. The proposed levy lid is a short-term fix only! The city has not taken the hard steps needed to reduce expenditures. Medina doesn’t need more taxes; it needs better fiscal management.
Spending examples: $54,000 on council guidelines (never adopted), $35,000 dollars on discretionary charitable contributions annually, a discretionary 5% raise for the city manager in 2019 despite a “budget crisis”, ~$2,000,000 in legal fees from 2013-2018, $65,000 settlement to a contractor who claimed she was owed employee benefits, $50,000+ on consultants regarding this levy, we pay a fulltime, tenured public works employee ~$60 per hour with benefits (great employee, unfortunately highly challenging and unscalable economics)
Before raising your Medina taxes over 40% annually, let’s reduce spending. Consider hiring an on-staff lawyer, combining services with Clyde Hill per their suggestion (police, maintenance, clerical) thus trimming staff and admin, tightening HR controls to mitigate settlements, and selling the post office (for someone else to operate) adding millions to reserves. The city won't stop running, you will have same number of police with less overhead and the city will operate within its means.
John Maffei, Wilma Edmonds, William Parks, nolevylid@gmail.com
