Greetings! Lucky me, I get the first discussion for what I hope turns out to be a productive group. So, here are my observations from the past city council meeting, May 18, 2009.

The first part of the meeting was to discuss the annexation of the Maple Woods and Maple Ridge neighborhoods. It was “public comments” night, and people could sign up to speak about their thoughts on annexation. If you didn’t already know, those two newer neighborhoods are in unincorporated King County, and aren’t part of the city (even though a back road connects them to Safeway!).

Three people spoke at the hearing, and two were in favor of annexation. The third person was concerned that the city might pull resources from existing neighborhoods to work on the new one, but seemed to generally be in favor of it as well.

That went quickly, so the council moved on to the budget hearing. Tony McCarthy gave a good presentation on what could have been extremely boring. The short of it is, the city will be able to get through 2009 without big budget problems.

2010 though, we’re expected to be short about $625,000. Now, the staff has already put through over $400K in cuts (the biggest by not hiring an assistant city manager), but they needed to do a few more things.

The biggest suggestion was to use money from the capital fund’s sales tax collection temporarily (currenty 25% goes to capital, and they would cut it to 10% for now). Another suggestion is a 1% utility tax, since we have very low utility taxes according to Tony.

Now, if the Maple Woods/Maple Ridge annexation goes according to plan, the city stands to gain about $500K per year that used to go to King County. The services the city will provide will probably amount to less than $5K per year (street sweeping, snow plowing, etc).

Money from issuing permits is way down this year, with only 35 expected to be issued this year (the city planned for 100). There was some brief discussion of the Fred Meyer project, and whether the city would get much sales tax revenue from it. The grocery business would probably just siphon from Safeway, QFC, and Red Apple (Maple Valley Market). However, many of the other things Fred Meyer carries can’t be found in the city, and we’d likely take that business from Covington.

The other pleasant increase is from the Streamlined Sales Tax Initiative (SSTI). I’ve known about this since July, since I sell most of my stuff online. The sales tax rate is now “destination-based”, instead of being based on where the retailer is. For example, if you bought a book from Amazon.com, the sales tax would have gone to the state, and the city where Amazon’s warehouse was. Now, the state gets their cut, KC gets theirs, and now Maple Valley gets the city’s cut. So, keep on shopping!

The last thing I’ll bring up was the Lake Wilderness Golf Course. The golf part is profitable, but the restaurant loses money, and is projected to lose about $120K this year. Everyone seemed satisfied that the loss is less than expected, but restaurants that lose this much money usually end up on Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares TV show. Why? They need radical change, but nothing like that was suggested. Can you imagine how packed the restaurant would be if the Olive Garden took it over? We like eating out, but for some reason we don’t like eating there.

So, what do YOU think?