Two City Council Bills that will likely come up before the full City Council on January 13th have caught our attention here at Concerned Taxpayers of Duval County. The first one is bill 2008-1021. This bill appropriates $109,000 from the Special Council Contingency/PSG/Cultural Council account to pay for the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra’s rental of Jacoby Symphony Hall at the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts for the 2008-09 orchestra season. So the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra cannot pay its rent. It provides a valuable service, right? Why not let the taxpayers help it out of its financial bind?
As Councilman Stephen Joost pointed out at a recent Finance Committee meeting, the number of people attending performances by the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra for the past budget year was 110,000+. If one more dollar had been charged per ticket, there would be no need to burden the Jacksonville taxpayer with this bill.
The second one is bill 2008-1055. This bill sets a graduated point system for evaluating the proximity of businesses seeking city government professional service contracts to Jacksonville. The pecking order for favoring contract candidates is businesses that have headquarters in Jacksonville followed by businesses with branch offices in Jacksonville followed by business with branch office elsewhere in Florida followed by business with no offices in Florida. So isn’t favoring local businesses who pay local taxes a good idea?
Not necessarily. By favoring local companies, the city may be limiting its pool of applicants since companies without a strong local presence may be less motivated to apply for local government contracts when they feel that the deck is stacked against them. As any economist will tell you, limiting supply will invariably increase prices. Even if we get more taxes from local businesses, we may pay out more in professional service fees due to a more limited supply of contract applicants. Also, the city may be missing out on national companies that have greater resources and better economies of scale than local companies.
The bill also could favor companies with larger staffs. This is due to an evaluation criterion expressed as “dividing the contract values from the City of Jacksonville over the last three years by the number of Jacksonville-based staff within the firm’s local offices” (bill text). The lower the calculated number, the better for the company seeking the contract. However, this number is likelier to be lower for companies with large local staff than for companies with smaller local staff even if all of the firms get the same dollar amount of contracts over the last three years. While the stated purpose of this criterion is to ensure “an equitable distribution of contracts among qualified firms” (bill text), it could have the effect of limiting smaller firms’ access to contracts with the city.
If you agree with this analysis of these bills, write your City Council representative (see http://www.coj.net/City+Council/City+Council+members.htm for more information) and/or speak out against these bills at next Tuesday’s City Council meeting. Only by participating in democracy can we have any influence on what Jacksonville city government does.
