Bring back grizzlies?
Truly a bad idea from urban legislator
Dublin City Council members engaged in quite a debate earlier this month when they discussed raising the hotel tax from 8% to 12%.
The tax, paid by people staying in the city’s six hotels, goes to the city’s general fund. It requires a majority vote of the public to change. Three members supported it, while Mayor Sherry Hu opposed adding another burden to hotel operators. The fifth council member, John Morada, abstained presumably because he didn’t see a compelling financial reason to raise it. The tax was established in 1984, just two years after the city started operating, and the rate has not been adjusted since.
Dublin, despite the retail churn in its original core, has maintained a solid budget thanks to planned aggressive residential growth and expansion in other areas. Morada said two prior city managers have forecast a budget deficit and he hasn’t seen it.
The city, fortunately, is in a much better place than neighboring Pleasanton, which has been cutting its budget and searching for new revenue. The Pleasanton council has put a measure on the ballot to raise the tax to 12% in two increments.
This is a time that both sides have reasonable arguments in Dublin. The city’s costs certainly have gone up in more than 40 years and I believe you should adjust fees/rates gradually as costs grow over time instead of hitting residents with big expense jumps. See the flap over Pleasanton’s water rate adjustment two years ago that truly irritated the public—the root cause was no adjustment for several years.
The hotel operators’ argument, put forward as well by the chamber of commerce, is don’t add one more thing. Nice try folks. Perhaps someone bringing a major convention to town may ask about hotel tax rates, but not the vast majority of occupants. It’s as simple as changing the entry on the software for taxes. The city has ambitious plans for its downtown area and funds to help leverage that private development could help move it forward.
A truly dumb bill is making its way through the California Legislature. Two urban legislators have decided it’s a good idea to try to bring grizzly bears back to the state. Thousands lived here historically, but there have been none for about a century. The legislators have joined together with environmental groups and tribes to urge a study about bringing back grizzly bears.
They should just leave well enough alone. The California natural environment has functioned fine without the apex predator. Bears, in case you haven’t been reading, are an increasing problem in areas such as Lake Tahoe. We have seen them on occasion there and, if you read the Wall Street Journal article from last week, you can see they are becoming beyond a nuisance as population grows and they become accustomed to human food.
Bear invasions into homes have been too common in the last few years.
And ranchers in rural areas have been battling with wolves who migrated from Oregon back to California. Calves are prime prey and there goes a rancher’s business.
The grizzly notion reminds me of the same type of campaign to protect mountain lions from hunting. One result is that the population is soaring because again, no natural predators. It’s nice to think of a mountain lion as an over-grown house cat until you encounter one in your driveway or on a trail (their habitat).
Here’s hoping rationality prevails and the bill finds the dust bin when it is heard Aug. 5 by the Assembly Appropriations Committee. Another pertinent question is whether this is the best use of legislative time to solve what isn’t a burning issue.
