The City Council won't raise the property tax, but if past years are any indication, they won't have any problem raising every available fee by a lot, including the charges for water, sewer and sanitation. For the "people living on the edge", that's the same difference. So who do they think they're kidding?

Mike, these are among the things that are expected to go up in price in the coming fiscal year:

Parking meters (25 cents)

Water utilities (overall retail rate increase of 6%)

Sanitation fees (9 cents per month)

Building inspection fees

Parking fines

The city is also recommending:

Implementation of scofflaw program to require
citation payment prior to vehicle registration

A warrant fee added to citations once warrant
status is reached

Those are for starters.

Yup, raise parking meters, and then give out more parking tickets for expired meters, which then draws less people to downtown, Deep Ellum, etc. which lowers sales tax revenue for a net decline in revenue.
Ft. Worth has free parking downtown at night& weekends and look at all the sales tax revenue they bring in on nights and weekends.

I hope that if Emperor Lepperto allows the city to catch fire and burn because of his misplaced budget priorities he doesn't blame it on the Christians or the Crows.

Normally I find Angela Hunt's comments to be very cogent, but not in this case. Does she really think we aren't aware of how poor the code budget already is? If their response times are any indication, it is on life support, and a funding cut will pull the cord from the wall.

My "team" does not recommend funding for the City Manager position. That would save the city close to $300,000.

We have code enforcement?????

@JF: My comment about the underfunding of code wasn't meant to imply that residents are dimwitted or unaware of code's poor performance. Rather, that the city has significantly underfunded what most residents consider a critical service. When I talk with residents, every single one of them has been surprised when I tell them that the city spends less than 1% of its budget on code.

Thanks for the reply Angela. I was just assuming it was underfunded because of how poor the responses are and how much effort it takes to get problems dealt with. I didn't think you were slighting residents - honestly, it just sounded from the quotation that you had somehow spoken with someone who didn't think code needed more funding. I'd love to know where this person lives!

Like everyone else you've talked to, I'm shocked by the

Angela: I had no idea that the city spends less than 1% of its budget on code enforcement. I always figured it was just one more thing that we pay for but don't receive. Anybody who has driven around this city can see we have very little code enforcement. I guess moving from 1% to 0% won't make things much worse than they already are.

Whatever the city funds for code enforcement will not mean squat. Too many people that work in the Dallas code enforcement area don't give a flip about doing their jobs. Likewise, for those few that are making an effort to clean up their assigned areas........bully for you.

Fitzgerald, I wouldn't say that. I know several code enforcement officers. They are very good at what they do. There's just not enough of them. And apparently, there still wouldn't be enough of them.

Somehow the end of my comment got cut off....

What I finished with was the fact that with such a small budget already, it would seem that the marginal dollar (as in incremental) spent on code does so much that we really can't afford to lose any.

Also, I wanted to know if there is an easy and user-friendly website that breaks down the city of Dallas budget.

Notes on Code Enforcement:

The Code Enforcement people in my neighborhood are visible constantly, give out citations like an old lady giving out candy at Halloween, hit me with two tickets in the 3.5 years I've lived here, swarmed all over a vacant house that was harboring vagrants, slapped several tickets on the vacant house, trash hauled the busted fence and dumped material (washing machine, car parts, tree limbs and other crap) from the vacant house, and boarded up all the windows to keep the vagrants out. It looks to me like they have too many workers as I see the code compliance cars\trucks out here all the time.

Guys and gals. Think the city is bad, look at the county. There is no code enforcement in the county. There are builders out there that do not know the difference between grade lumber and utility grade lumber. I have pictures of utility lumber being used for roof support structural.