“There just isn’t any money.” — Manteca Fire Chief Kirk Waters.



You can slice it and dice it, analyze it, and play Monday morning quarterback all you want but at the end of the day it all comes down to the simple point Chief Waters made on Thursday. The City of Manteca doesn’t have the money.

The 16 layoffs that will take place on July 1 is just part of the pain. The city needs compensation concessions averaging about 10 percent for each of the remaining municipal workers to bridge the remaining 60 percent of the $4.2 million shortfall in revenue.

It’s human nature to assess blame. But before anyone gets smug, there’s plenty of blame to go around and Manteca is not alone. And when push comes to shove, Manteca is better off than most cities.

So let’s go through the likely list of culprits people will spend time blaming. First, there’s the City Council. There are some who believe they should of seen this coming. Yes and no. In terms of the mortgage meltdown name someone who wasn’t caught up in the euphoria either using their house as an ATM or who was squirreling money away and selling stock because they knew a financial apocalypse was on its way.

Yes, there had been rumblings year-to-year from council members that the city needed to look at its structured deficit. In retrospect it was a broken record from coast-to-coast. But when the extra money flowed in from the building boom that we know was now fueled by mortgage manipulation, the demand was big from everyone to spend the money.

Employee groups certainly can’t criticize the council for not looking out for them. They raised pay when the money was coming in. The only problem is they overshot the runway. It was argued that it was responsible 10 years ago to be fair to municipal employees compared to other cities just as you can argue it is responsible today to take away some of that compensation to keep the city afloat.

There are very few who can honestly step up among Manteca residents and said they demanded that the city not provide additional services and to flat line everything when growth was occurring.

And for those who want to slam city employees for whatever reason, they are - by whatever yardstick you want to use - more efficient than many other municipality workforces in terms of the jobs they do with the amount of personnel. It’s been that way for quite a while in everything from the fire and police departments to parks and street maintenance.

Manteca has always been relative lean and mean due to another “structural” problem.

The city for decades had been essentially a bedroom community with a weak retail base. Industrial and business park style users generate surplus property taxes compared to the costs they incur for a city. Housing generates less than the cost it does to provide everything from public safety to parks. Keep in mind that just about 12 percent of your property tax bill goes to the city.

Manteca up until a few years ago had a major retail bleed. That means the anticipated per capita spending of residents wasn’t going 100 percent to businesses in town that in turn collect the one penny included in the sales tax for local government helps primarily underwrite local public safety.

Ironically, it was the demise of Spreckels Sugar in 1996 that set in motion city decisions that ultimately helped cut a large chunk of the lag in municipal income. The Spreckels Park development significantly boosted property and sales tax. It also gave Manteca the ability through redevelopment agency investments to put infrastructure and other mechanisms in place that helped pump up retail sales elsewhere in the city.

At the end of the day the layoffs this week were a painful but essential move by the city.

City leaders need to continue securing new sources of sales tax.

Some of us may not like the system of how municipal government is supported but that is the hand that cities in California have been dealt by those in Sacramento.

And the only way a city can avoid folding  is to learn to play those cards better than their neighboring cities.