Johnson: "You’re Elected To Make Decisions That Aren’t Always Popular With Everybody."

The Roseville City Council, on a split vote this week, approved the sale of $17 million in bonds to finance construction of a new fire station and a continuing a series of community-wide park improvements.

Several residents spoke in opposition to the bond sale, asserting citizens should have been given the chance to vote on the issue in a referendum. Others contended the increase in property taxes is too much to bear right now with many people jobless and a growing percentage of residents senior citizens who are on fixed or limited incomes.

But after the lengthy public hearing, the Council approved the bond sale on a 3-2 vote. Voting for the bond sale were Mayor Dan Roe and Councilmen Jeff Johnson and Bob Wilmus; dissenting were Tammy McGehee and Tammy Pust.

Here are excerpts of what each council member had to say about the bond sale and their votes:

Tammy Pust:  As a city council member I’m elected to represent the city and make decisions for the whole community. We look at financial decisions in two categories. One is the sort of ongoing, general day-to-day financial decisions—how we’re going to use your tax dollars. Separate from that there’s an additional category of the budget that we do—issuing debt, debt service—which generally speaking we go out to the voters and ask for because it’s long-term investment. Government in Roseville, government in this nation, generally on capital stuff, we go to referendums on those. We want to ask our community, ‘Do you want to invest in this stuff or don’t you?’

Jeff Johnson:  Well, I know I’m not a popular individual in the house tonight, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes. You’re elected to make decisions that aren’t always popular with everybody.

It’s not easy to be in disagreement with people coming forward to you. I do believe that the bulk of what’s being done—the reason we’re here for the fire station, the reason we’re here for parks—is because there has been neglect on the part of councils in the past. There has been mismanagement of the maintenance fund.

Many of the dollars that we’re getting in this bonding go forward for capitol improvement in this community. That’s something that Mayor Roe and I have accepted over the past few years. These are actions that are going to take us into the future to be a better city.

I don’t see this as improvement, I see this as action that has been neglected. The fire stations were mildewed, they were rotten, they were decrepit. Our fire staff deserves a state-of-the-art fire hall. Our park system deserves a new and updated facility.

I think it’s my duty to maintain parks, to maintain a fire station, to maintain a police station, to maintain a roof on an Oval, to maintain any facility that this city has taken stake in.

Bob Willmus: Years ago as a junior member of the parks commission, I sat at that very table as we had meetings with our city council at the time. And that parks commission years ago said, ‘Council, you are not adequately funding the facilities that you have and you’re at a crossroads: We either invest in these facilities or we start liquidating some of these assets.’ There were decisions made years ago not to liquidate those assets, to retain those assets.

Is it fiscally responsible to let your capital assets rot and deteriorate over time? Previous councils have pushed this to the future. ‘We don’t want to deal with the fact that our fire station is deteriorating and rotting.’ This council has stepped up and said, ‘We are going to reinvest in this community.’ This is where we are today and this is where this action tonight is about.

Tammy McGehee: I ran for this job because I believe in civic engagement and I believe a city council should be paying attention to improving the revenue stream of its community.

I have been extremely disappointed in my year and three quarters on the council on our record of civic engagement and the things the council has done that’s jeopardized the revenue stream for the city in the future. In terms of these particular projects, I share the feeling of the people who spoke of the Taj Mahal of the fire station.

We have more equipment than at least a third party believes we need and that’s caused us to build more space. We have the best park system in the metro area now, and we don’t need to make all these improvements.

Dan Roe: A referendum does make sense whenever we’re spending capital money on significant projects in the community. I think the difference with this project is it’s very much like the sewer and water main funding that we added to our sewer and water main fees last year.

City councils are elected to spend money on the part of their citizens and they don’t always have to do it with a referendum. I think the point in this particular instance is we’re talking about a backlog of things that have not been kept up as they should be. They’re things that were brought forward in 2006, even before I was on the council, to the tune of about $15 million of things that needed to be done but weren’t getting done. So our choice is: Can we continue to not get things done and leave it for somebody else down the road, leave it to the next council?

We chose not to do that with the water and sewer mains. We chose to address it in a short time frame. It was certainly short time frame pain but in the long run, we are leaving our city better off in those issues.

We have the choice of doing the projects over 20 or 30 years and spending $2 million a year on the projects, which is about the same levy increase, or we can do them in a faster time frame and get ourselves caught up. 

But ultimately, when we look back at the community 20 years from now we’re going to say we made the right decision, without significant ups and downs in the levy year-to-year, which can create a lot of grief in the taxpayers, as we hear every year in consideration of the levy.