In their July 16, 2011 edition the Scottsdale Republic published my answers to five questions about city issues submitted to me by their editors. Here are those answers:

1. How happy were you with the process of writing the 2011-12 budget? And with the final result?

I was unhappy with both the process and the final result. The way I have always wanted the process to work is that the City Council should give the City Manager clear but general guidance on how we want the budget to look months in advance and then let the City Manager work out the details. We should have given the City Manager specific direction on issues such as service cuts, layoffs and/or furloughs, outsourcing and the use of reserves. Without this clear guidance the process ended up being disorganized, with the Council fighting it out on the dais over details and voting as many as seven times on the same issue either because of lack of clarity or because losing factions wanted to reverse earlier outcomes.

Predictably, this bad process produced a bad result. The budget for next fiscal year that my Council colleagues passed (over my objections) is unbalanced - revenues are projected to be lower than expenses, requiring the use of reserves to cover the deficit. Even worse, the budget predicts bigger shortfalls in the outlying years, despite using assumptions about the economy that I believe are unrealistically optimistic. Clearly this budget defers some of the tough choices in the hope that an economic recovery will make them unnecessary. I predict that will simply make those choices even more traumatic when they inevitably have to be made.

While I credit the City Manager with reducing spending and overhead over the last two years we clearly needed to do more. Despite the cuts we have made, Scottsdale still has more city employees per resident and the largest general fund expense per resident of any of our neighboring cities. This suggests that Scottsdale is the least efficient provider of municipal services of any of our neighboring cities. We should have been finding ways to make our service delivery more efficient before we looked at cutting services to our residents.

2. What council actions do you consider highlights of the past six months?

There were few bright spots. In the budget we did manage to minimize service cuts to our residents. And we did not increase either the property tax or the water and sewer fees.

3. Any disappointments?

The budget was certainly a disappointment. I am also disappointed that the majority of my Council colleagues are approving projects such as Blue Sky that will lower the quality of life in Scottsdale and change the character of our city in ways that our residents certainly did not intend.

4. How do you rate efforts to revitalize McDowell Road and expand the tourism area along Bell Road?

During one of the candidate forums during the 2010 election campaign I had a voter complain to me that the city had "not done enough for South Scottsdale." I replied that the real problem was that the city had done too much, of the wrong things! While previous Councils spent over a decade trying to find a way to help the developer of the Los Arcos site get a massive subsidy from the city (over my objections) the retail businesses (and the sales tax revenues they generate) that should have been built on that site went instead to Tempe and to the reservation. Unfortunately, there are few good proposals currently on the table for either the McDowell or Bell corridors, so we will have to dig deeper to find ways to make good things happen in both areas.

5. Where should the council's focus be when you return from your summer break?

Despite the fact that we just finished crafting the 2011-12 budget we need to get started on the 2012-13 budget right away. We need to squarely address the issue of why Scottsdale is the least efficient provider of municipal services of any of our neighboring cities if we any hope of having sustainable budgets for the long term. We also are in the process of crafting an update to our General Plan, which is supposed to be the guiding document for Scottsdale's future development. This update requires voter approval and will be on the ballot in March of 2012. Right now the update being developed by our Planning staff is, in my opinion, too special-interest friendly and too resident-unfriendly. Unless this changes I will be opposing that update.

We also need to put the brakes on the special-interest "land rush" that has resulted from my Council colleagues approval of the grossly-misnamed "Infill Incentive District (IID)." Instead of rewarding developers with incentives for providing community benefits (as the name implies) our Planning staff and my Council colleagues are treating the IID as if it were a blanket rezoning of our entire Downtown to allow massive increases in height and density, which translates into massive crowding, traffic problems and expensive burdens on our city infrastructure. Earlier this year I proposed some reasonable criteria for approving projects under the IID but a majority of my Council colleagues opposed implementing those criteria. We need to fix that.