City reviews new ways to make money

City Manager Mary Suhm presented to the City Council today some novel ideas to increase revenues for a city facing another budget gap at the beginning of the next fiscal year. Some of them I applaud mightily -- particularly a tax on plastic bags and bottles, although I would hope it wouldn't generate revenue as much as it would help to eliminate the use of both the bags and the bottles. Others -- like privatizing solid waste pickup -- shouldn't even be considered. Garbage collection used to be privatized in Dallas and the results were disastrous. We don't need to endure that pain again.

Others I thought are worth considering:

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  Charging an overhead fee to entities that use off-duty police officers for private security. The key word here is "private."


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  Becoming a self-serving Retail Electric Provider (REP) and taking advantage of wholesale power purchase rather than buying power in retail market through another REP. This idea by itself has the potential of not only closing the entire budget gap, but giving the City more revenues to restore what was stripped in the current budget.


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  Partnering with an energy service company to (1) install energy efficient lighting technology (such as LED) in street lights, parking lights, ball field lights, etc., and (2) implement technology to vaporize waste at the transfer stations rather than dispose of that waste at the landfill. These are ideas that should be explored even if there wasn't a budget gap.


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  Investigating the opportunity to require solid waste collected within city to be disposed of within city which would increase the volume received at McCommas Landfill and generate additional revenue. OK, I know it smacks of heavy-handed governmental interference, but, by golly, I like it, at least during fiscal years when necessary to reduce budget shortfalls.




• Outsourcing alarm permitting and enforcement to increase revenue, improve compliance with ordinance, and reduce false alarms. I distinctly remember the city doing this at one time but, even though it was supported by Police Chief Kunkel, Da Mayor pushed through an ordinance to eliminate the practice.


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  Identifying the best and highest use of underutilized City property and either lease, swap, or sell the asset; and identifying City services that operate in leased space and move them into City-owned space if available. Why, in heaven's name, has the City waited so long to come up with these ideas?


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  Implementing a garage sale permit fee and fines for holding a garage sale without said permit. I may be the only person in the world who thinks this is a great idea; but just about every other "sales" outlet needs a city permit to conduct business, so why exempt these?
  

Ms. Suhm came up with some ideas, in addition to privatizing solid waste collection, I''m not that wild about:

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  Selling the use of City name/seal to promote private products or services. Look, we already have "the official hot dog of the City of Dallas" (Do I need to speak his name?), we don't need another one.


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  Renewing natural gas drilling leases which expire during FY11. There are simply too many unaddressed health and safety questions connected with this drilling for me to feel totally comfortable with it.


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  Outsourcing 311 service to a private call center or regionalizing 311 service by selling our 311 services to neighboring jurisdictions. This has all the earmarks of making a bad situation worse. Instead, why not charge other cities to hand over their 311 needs to Dallas?




• Changing bulk-trash from monthly service to on-demand service. While I don't advocate "on-demand" bulk trash pickup, I would definitely like to see how much money the City would save by going to a quarterly pickup schedule instead of a monthly one.


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  Begin charging a franchise fee to the Department of Sanitation for the use of city streets and alleys. This is PILOT all over again. If it's wrong to sneak it into the Water Department's budget, it's equally wrong to sneak it into the Sanitation Services Department's.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. Of course, what is really required is a tax hike, but I imagine only council member Tennell Atkins will have the courage to point that out.