Get Lights vote right this time

Can we please get the vote right this time on Arcadia street lights? For goodness sakes, it’s less than 10-cents per day for most of us!

by Scott Hettrick

You’ll soon be getting a vote-by-mail ballot from the City again about how to cover the $420,000 to literally keep the lights on around town. (Once again it’s poor timing since you probably also just received an unrelated election ballot for the June 8 state primary. You’ll have until July 20 to return your Arcadia mail-in ballot for the street lights.)

The situation with Arcadia street lights is no less complicated now than it was about a year-and-a-half ago when the City asked us the same question. City officials tried to simplify the explanation this time around but I don’t think the fancy four-page color mailer and the two-sided FAQ sheet made it much easier to understand.

The bottom line is this: the previous way of paying for street lights around town is no longer allowed, and that means the City needs property owners to cover the $420,000 that it costs to keep existing lighting going. It works out to about $28.44 for most single family homeowners per year, or less than $2.40 per month.

Just say YES!

You may have never paid anything for street lights and you may not even have lights on your street. That shouldn’t be how you decide how to vote. Here’s why: If you or your family or friends ever appreciate having lights on any other streets in Arcadia that you may frequently or occasionally walk, ride or drive at night, it will only cost you less than $2.40 per month to keep those on.

Even if you don’t care about street lights, or even if the City Council decides to cover all or most of the $42o,000 without our help (at a minimum the City is obliged to maintain street lighting on the busiest streets), you need to understand that other City services will have to be cut to cover that $420,000 or any part of it that is used.

If you vote no on being charged less than $2.40 per month for street lighting, you are essentially voting yes to getting either less police or fire protection, or less street and tree maintenance, or shorter library or museum hours, or fewer recreation services and shorter hours for tennis courts and parks, or a combination of all of the above.

The City already cut $1.5 million in expenses and will need to cut another $140,000 in June. City departments have already submitted cost-cutting proposals and options involving cutting back hours of some important City employees, cutting operating hours, and discontinuing some City services.

If this vote goes down to defeat again, an additional $420,000 may have to be cut from City services.

Most of us have already been paying this $2.40 or so per month or an amount close to it; some have been paying more. Many of us have been paying nothing. Some will pay significantly less than the $2.40 per month under the arcane formula — only $16.73 per year ($1.40 per month) if you live on a major thoroughfare, for instance, since the City is paying for those lights anyway.

The biggest challenge comes with business owners and owners of property with multiple units like apartment buildings, many of whom live out of town, in another state, or even out of the country. And therein lies the rub. A property owner gets the number of votes equivalent to the number of residences on his property. So an apartment building with 50 units gets 50 votes, for example.

Businesses and multi-family dwellings pay more than the rest of us but the formula to determine how much more is very complicated — it’s not simply multiplied by the number of units in the buildings or by the size of the property.

And because this is a vote by property owner and not registered voters (which is why it is a mail ballot instead of a vote at the polls), the majority of out-of-town property owners voted against this measure the last time around for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the ballot went to an accountant at the business of the property owner who simply voted no to an additional expense that they don’t want to pay or pass on to their renters or clients, and that single decision could have translated to 50 “no” votes.

Last time most single family owners voted yes, but that was not enough to offset the absentee property owners. During one of the many informational presentations that City manager Don Penman and other City officials made to various civic groups in the past couple of weeks (City officials are prohibited from advocating a position on this issue), Penman responded to my question by saying that if all or even most single family homeowners VOTE YES this time, we can probably overcome the votes of absentee property owners.

So, let’s make that our goal — mail in your ballot with a YES vote and get all your family and friends who own property, residential or business, to do the same.

We don’t need more City service cutbacks than we’re already facing, and I can’t imagine that less than $2.40 per month is even going to be noticeable to many of us. — By Scott Hettrick