Dear City Council members, I write to encourage you to consider what structural changes could save the city money. 1 - Consider outsourcing our police services to the San Mateo County Sheriff's department. San Carlos, Millbrae, Half Moon Bay, Portola Valley and Woodside have done so. While this may not be popular with the current police staff, the cost savings would give you a tremendous flexibility to preserve highly valued services like libraries and child care, both of which benefit working families (among others). Many of our current police staff would logically continue in a similar role with the County Sheriff's dept. This shift would also reduce our future pension obligations and enable us to work toward closing the gap on our current unfunded pension liability. 2 - Is there any outsourcing that makes sense in our very large public works budget ($105 MM of this year's $171MM)? For example, could another agency run our water district more efficiently? I ask this admittedly knowing little about how water districts operate or how much might be saved. However, I notice that the public works for neighboring towns is much less: $86 MM in Redwood City, (a much larger city) and $23.6 MM in San Carlos (about our size). Both are operating public works departments at a much lower cost-per-resident than Menlo Park, and a comparison should be evaluated to understand where we could improve. With the challenges at hand, I thank you for the hard work required of all of you and the city staff to deal with the budget crisis imposed by the COVID virus. I encourage council members to push for creative solutions that support the long term sustainability goals that led last year's budgeting process. Best, Debbie Hall 1245 Hillview Drive Menlo Park Received on Mon May 18 2020 - 17:57:01 PDT
