Valley Council members growing optimistic

The city of Spokane Valley’s financial outlook is continuing to improve, City Council members learned Saturday, and the better budget picture means the staff can expand to meet the growing demands of the two-year-old city.

The council agreed to add nine new positions to its staff of about 50. One additional position is still being considered.

“We purposefully suppressed the number of employees we engaged (when the city formed). We knew we had a start-up debt,” City Manager Dave Mercier said. “We are in an improved financial situation” now.

The council held its annual winter retreat Saturday, where Finance and Administrative Services Director Ken Thompson shared a brighter financial forecast than the council has seen in the past. At the same retreat a year ago, the city was predicting a deficit by this year, growing to a $4 million hole by 2009. The retreat, at City Hall, was open to the public.

The updated forecast says the general fund won’t be in the red until 2010 now, and the fund for street maintenance is safe until 2009. However, there still won’t be city money available anytime soon for capital projects such as new parks or new streets.

The improved outlook is based, in large part, on the fact that more money is being spent in Spokane Valley than expected. A year ago, the staff predicted sales-tax revenues would grow 1.58 percent a year. With an extra year of data behind them, the staff says a more accurate projection is for that pot of money to grow 2 percent a year.

Spokane Valley is also experiencing a building boom.

“This is an organization that is knee deep in construction,” Councilman Mike DeVleming said.

The city issued about 3,200 building permits last year, or about 13 a day. With two full-time building inspectors and some on-call inspectors, the city conducted an average of 105 building inspections a day. The city doesn’t want to let the quality of inspections suffer because of the heavy workload, Mercier said.

“That’s simply too demanding to sustain in the long term,” he said.

For that reason, the city plans to hire one more building inspector. The council also agreed to hire a full-time public information officer, public works superintendent, engineer, accountant, personnel analyst and administrative assistant. It will hire a part-time senior traffic engineer and increase its information technology specialist position to full time from half time.

The new salaries, benefits and the need for more leased space at City Hall will cost the city about $512,000.

The decision to add a public information officer wasn’t reached without debate.

“I’d rather hire a code-enforcement officer,” Councilman Mike Flanigan said.

The majority of council members believed, though, that employing someone to educate the public on city issues was worthwhile – and something they’ve failed at so far, Deputy Mayor Richard Munson added.

”(Disseminating information) is a multi-legged stool, and every time we sit on that stool we fall over,” he said.

Heated issues, such as last year’s debate over who would run the library, whether the council members should get a pay raise and the failure of a street bond, were mentioned as examples of times when a public information officer could have helped smooth relationships between the council and citizens.

The other hire under consideration is a city attorney, a vacancy the city has had since October when its attorney resigned. The council isn’t debating the need for an attorney, but it is considering either contracting out the job to a firm or hiring someone in-house who would only have one focus: the city. Contracting out the position would cost about $100,000 while hiring an employee would cost about $120,000, Deputy City Manager Nina Regor said.

Spokane Valley, population 85,000, has a lean staff compared to other Washington cities, including those that contract out as many services as Spokane Valley does. That includes Lakewood, population 59,000, which employs 125 people not including the police department, which was recently brought in-house; and Shoreline, population 53,000, which employs 133.