Source: The Daily Mail

A senior staff member commented to me recently that we have seen a perfect storm of economic forces that have left us unusually vulnerable. I agree. We have had:

• a rotten national economy,
• falling property values (equals lower tax collections),
• falling retails sales (equals lower sales tax collections),
• a high tax rate (leaves little room to increase it for more revenue),
• sharply declining new construction (little new increase to the tax base), and
• a high amount of debt (debt payments take 44% of property tax collections).

Normally all these don't come at us at the same time. On the other hand, we've been moving toward this bottleneck for quite some time and it wasn't going to take much to heighten the effects of any storm.
 
We will weather this storm. The economy will improve. When it does, employment will increase and local sales will increase. Construction will resume and a fiscally-focused Council will limit additional debt. This storm will not last.
 
However, this storm is also a perfect warning of what lies ahead only a little further down the road and that storm will be permanent.
 
Many of the same conditions that we are seeing now will return permanently when we reach build-out, the description of when there is little available land to continue building and growing. New construction will come close to halting. Sales tax revenues will be near maximum. Our property base will stagnate.
 
In some ways, we've been treading water for a number of years. We've had virtually no increase to our existing property base year after year. With inflation considered, we have been on a decline for years. This year we had strong dip, which only compounds the effects. New construction has been our saving force several times by injecting much needed new value into the base.
 
The next storm won't be exactly the same: employment rates and sales tax collections would hopefully be better than now. However, we currently have one of the lowest property base values per capita of any city in the area (a couple are lower). Our foundation is thin. Other area cities can fare better because their property base is higher and their sales tax collections are much better. Much of the economic growth that we've seen, which has not been stellar compared to those other cities, will grind nearly to a halt. There is always some infill construction that would keep us moving, albeit slowly.
 
Sounds rather forlorn, I know, but it doesn't have to be that way. We are going to have to make major changes. I'm very optimistic about our future… if we make major changes. I haven't seen the results of our Envision Garland process that has been underway for almost two years but I have high hopes. We as a city have had attitude changes before and we have to do so again. Once we reach build-out, we are literally by definition becoming more urban. We have to embrace it. For example, to give an example unappealing to many, we have to conquer our fear of apartments and higher density housing, but we don't have to accept the negative consequences that we've seen from past developments. We aren't going to be able to increase the property base without more private investment, some densification, and growing our population.
 
We also have to change many of the ways we do business. We have to focus on the things that will grow the city. We can't waste resources for non-essential programs or for things that can be postponed. We have to market the city. Employees and Council members must ask ourselves at each decision point: will this grow the city? Those decisions and deciding that line will be a very large challenge. We are not currently prepared. We're doing some innovation efforts moving in the right direction but we're not yet to the fine tuning and we've not looked the beast in the eye and hardened ourselves to the task of conquering it.