Atherton wants to pursue cost-benefit study of fire district

In the last thread on this topic, the Almanac deleted (without annotation) a comment by Peter Carpenter in which he revealed that Atherton City Manager George Rodericks has threatened to put him under investigation, presumably by the Atherton Police Department.

What is the status of this? Has the Almanac fact checked this? People shouldn't be put under threat of investigation for not "going with the program".

I feel like I need to give my mea culpa for once again providing incorrect information in "other thread" (now locked only to those willing to login).

I had argued that Gov code 56730 appeared to call for true revenue neutrality in the case of a LAFCo special district reorganization. As I said, I'm an amateur hack, and my conclusion evidences that. Gov code sec 56730 does indeed invoke the neutrality clause, but specifically for "special reorganizations". I had assumed that since the fire district is a special district and this would be a LAFCo reorg that it must be special reorganization. In point of fact, special reorgs only apply to reorgs that include a city incorporation (from the definition section). So, my interpretation is thus that this is an ordinary reorganization that would use the procedures described in Gov code 56810 to determine the property tax allocation.

As such, Peter's understanding (as provided directly by the LAFCo executive) that the ongoing property tax reallocation would be based directly on prior year fiscal net expenses appears to be entirely correct. That is to say, the town would be limited to the current net expenditure that the fire district spends on servicing that part of the territory to be xfered and the balance of any "excess" would likely go in the same proportion to those other agencies which have a shared tax rate area (approx. 23.6% to the county, 10.6% to the town, 16.7% elementary district, 15.6% high school district, sm jr college 6.7%, 3% library, 1.4% hospital district, 1.8% open space district, air qual+harbor+drainage+mosquito 1%).

Sorry for any confusion that my ponderings have generated.

Due to repeated violations of our Terms of Use, comments from this poster are automatically removed. Why?