Author Archive
What can Police Officers teach Firefighters?
In October of 2009, I wrote an article about what Firefighters could teach Police Officers. Thanks to an article in the Los Angeles Times on May 14, 2012, it’s time to look in the other direction. The subtitle of the article is “Patients who summon paramedics for rides to clinics or to refill prescriptions are [...]
The Inadequacy of One
Will I calculate service costs based on a single unit of service? Yes, but I don’t like to. It’s often hard to make the case for including the estimated units of service in a “Fee Study” (Study) as it increases our costs and the customer is trying to obtain a Study at the lowest possible [...]
Systemic Problems with Labor Negotiations
Many years ago, I audited a city in the San Gabriel Valley area of greater Los Angeles that was especially well-managed. One of the features that made this city exceptional was the process they used for labor negotiations. Before telling you what they did, I would like to summarize what many cities are currently doing. [...]
Rethinking Animal Control
When our company started doing cost of services studies in the early 1980’s, it was routinely suggested that 50% of animal control costs could be recovered from dog licenses. The other 50% was looked at as a public safety expense to protect the community from rabies. In other words, all residents of the community would [...]
Keeping Budget Problems in Perspective
I’m writing this on March 18, 2011, or seven days after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked Japan followed by a four meter tsunami that devastated the City of Sendai followed by a still unfolding nuclear disaster as the plume of radiation has finally made it to the West Coast. While we are cutting our budgets [...]
Capitalism and Local Government
One of the many nice features of our capitalist system is the ability to vote with our dollars to get the products that we want in the market place. When we go into a grocery store, we have many choices in the products that we buy and we can buy one item or many. The [...]
Development’s Winners and Losers
There are four players in the development game: developers, contractors, land owners and current residents. Each plays a critical role and each has goals that are not necessarily shared by the others.
Achieving the Potential of GASB 34
Statement 34 was adopted with much fanfare by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in June of 1999. By the end of 2004, more than 84,000 governmental units were required to include the (estimated) historical cost of infrastructure in their comprehensive annual financial reports. This statement had been circulating in various forms almost since the [...]
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