Anyone wanting to sell a car on public property — namely, streets — will have to fill out an application and have the vehicle inspected by the Department of Public Works. There could be fines and towing for those who don’t obey.

The public not notified of the ordinance or provided an opportunity for input before the measure was  debated and approved, 10-4, by the council Tuesday morning.

The $40 fee already is in effect in small areas of the city, and Ald. Joe Davis asked the council’s Public Safety Committee to extend it to his district as well. The committee, instead, recommended Tuesday morning that it be extended to the entire city and the council agreed a short time later.

A portion of Ald. Robert Donovan’s district was the first to be subject to the $40 fee. Donovan told the committee that the large volume of car sales on the streets were causing problems in some areas. He said some of the cars sold turned out to be stolen.

Ald. Robert Puente said it would be easier for police to enforce the ordinance if it were citywide.

Voting against the measure were Aldermen Jim Bohl, Michael Murphy and Joe Dudzik and Alderwoman Milele Coggs.

“All of you are aware that the city has been dealing with an ongoing imbalance between the costs of continuing service levels from year-to-year and the revenue growth available to fund those costs,” Nicolini wrote in a letter outlining preliminary budget instructions. “I am sorry to inform you that the imbalance has now reached a point where ‘managed decline’ is no longer a viable budget option.”

Barrett already is warning that the city may lose as many as 1,400 jobs over the next two years.

Nicolini said there are many financial stress factors that “include the cumulative impacts of changes in state shared revenue policy and the impact of the economy on the property tax base and other non-property tax local revenues.”

Health care and retirement cost trends, which have been favorable in recent years, “have taken a decided turn for the worse,” Nicolini wrote. “Final projections about these costs will not be available until late summer, but it is clear that the only sustainable means of addressing these cost increases is a substantial reduction to the number of city employees.”

Nicolini’s letter was provided to Milwaukee Rising by Ald. Michael Murphy, chairman of the Common Council’s Finance and Personnel Committee.

For 2010, department heads should propose budgets that will only continue — and not improve — 2009 service levels and should not expect to see even those budget requests granted, he said.

“This approach to budget requests is not a blank check to request increased funding, nor should any department expect that the proposed budget will include the amount needed to continue services at their current level,” Nicolini wrote. “The city faces significant fiscal challenges. The Proposed Executive Budget will include budget reductions of between 15%-20% relative to the baseline in order to pay for non-discretionary fringe benefit cost increases and debt service within levy limits and available non-property tax revenues.”

That 5% decline in value means less money for pothole patching, police, firefighters, libraries and other city services unless Mayor Tom Barrett and the Common Council enact a significant increase in the property tax rate.

“The picture is very grim at this point,” said Ald. Michael Murphy, chairman of the Common Council’s Finance and Personnel Committee. “You do see some increases in the housing market nationally, but locally, there’s still pain to come.”

Adopting a budget that keeps the tax levy at $237 million, the same amount as this year, would require a 43-cent, 5.3% increase in the property tax rate, according to Milwaukee Rising calculations. The rate would rise from $8.09 per $1,000 assessed valuation for this year to $8.52 per $1,000 for 2010.

A 3% levy increase, expected to be the maximum allowed by law, would generate $7.1 million in new taxes and require an 68-cent, 8.4% property tax rate increase.  The rate would rise from $8.09 per $1,000 assessed valuation for this year to $8.77 per $1,000 for 2010, Reavey said.

The city’s taxable property value is projected to decline from $29.3 billion to $27.8 billion, Reavey wrote to Murphy, who requested the information.

The city is facing enormous fiscal pressures, including a large pension contribution, in 2010.

Murphy said he and Barrett already have informally agreed to freeze hiring, except for public safety positions, until the end of the year.  That should reduce the city’s payroll by about 250 employees, he said.

“Services will not be as quickly responded to as in the past because there will be fewer and fewer people to do the work,” Murphy said.

Levying to make up the $11.8 million would be difficult, he said.

“There’s a limit to what you can tax people when they are losing their jobs,” he said.

Some city residents probably may be facing higher tax bills whether or not the city increases the levy.

“Because of the diversity of city neighborhoods, even your preference of keeping the tax rate level will create a tax shift this year to properties that do not go down as much as the citywide decrease in value,” Reavey wrote. “This is not unlike the rising market of the past where the tax burden of property going up higher than the citywide average assumed a greater tax burden than the previous year.”

Property owners will get their assessment notices next month.

The total number of open foreclosures and bank or city-owned properties was 6,532 at the end of February, Reavey wrote. Their total assessed value was $737 million.

“In many cases it is the same areas of the City where we saw substantial increases in assessed values in the recent past that we see the strongest impact of foreclosures and other negative influences today,” she wrote.

The precise impact of foreclosures is not clear, Reavey said. While they do affect value, each one must be analyzed to determine how much, she said. Her office is aware of properties that were sold by a bank and then resold for much more by the purchaser, she said.

“No matter how the Mayor and Council decide to tackle this budget, it will be challenging,” she said.

“I’ve received complaints on the ad hoc placement of officers,” he told the Common Council this week.

Traffic near the stadium has become a bigger issue since the Brewers started winning regularly and drawing large crowds. Brewers-generated traffic jams made it extremely difficult to enter or leave the Story Hill neighborhood last year on some big game days because there were no traffic officers assigned to intersections such as W. Bluemound and N. Hawley Roads or Bluemound and N. Story Parkway.

The Brewers pay for the city to provide security at Miller Park and the council this week approved a $1.5 million agreement for the upcoming season. There apparently is disagreement, though, between the Brewers and the Police Department about who should pay for traffic officers working on city streets outside of Miller Park, Murphy said.

“The two of them need to get that resolved in the coming season because there is a traffic safety issue,” Murphy said.

Kudos to WisDOT for that smart move. The trail should help spark development of some of its neighboring properties, which are now in “far from ideal use” category. It also will provide an alternative transportation means during reconstruction of the Zoo Interchange.

The trail is supposed to head further west, but the Zoo Interchange project will involve reconstructing several overpasses that run directly over the trail. It’s possible that the western section will be opened as a crushed limestone trail, but no decision has been made yet, officials said at the quarterly Story Hill Neighborhood Association meeting.

Hats off to State Sen. Jim Sullivan (D-Wauwatosa) and Milwaukee Ald. Michael Murphy, who pushed hard to get the state to take on this important project.

“This is a very important piece of legislation,” said Ald. Michael Murphy, who sponsored it with Aldermen Jim Bohl, Robert Bauman and Willie Wade. Murphy said the ordinance is being eyed as a nationwide model.

Under the legislation, lenders must inspect a property once a foreclosure action is filed and register the property if it appears to be abandoned. Lenders must reinspect occupied properties every 30 days.

The ordinance also requires lenders to assure that:

•    Buildings are secured and inaccessible to unauthorized persons.
•    Litter, trash, debris and graffiti are removed.
•    Grass is mowed, noxious weeds are removed, vegetation trimmed.
•    Immediate risks to health, welfare and safety are eliminated.
•    Public walkways are kept free from ice, snow, mud and other debris.

Violations can bring fines of $100 to $2,000.

Many banks and lenders support the ordinance, which was modified in draft form after lending institutions objected to some of its original provisions, according to testimony before the Common Council’s Zoning, Neighborhoods and Development Committee.

The city has 1,700 foreclosed properties, with another 4,500 “on the waiting list,” Murphy told the council.

In some instances, owners who can’t make their mortgage payments are simply walking away from the properties, he said.

As a result, “the snow is not shoveled on the sidewalks, the grass is not cut, the garbage is not picked up, these properties end up becoming attractive nuisances, they become problems with gang members, solicitation. They also become fire traps, they also provide further decline in property tax values of the properties adjacent to them.”

The new ordinance, he said, is “not a silver bullet in terms of addressing all of these issues.”

The ordinance gives the city one way to deal with an issue made more difficult by the securitization and sale of loans between institutions. Murphy singled out Deutsche Bank, based in Germany. Deutsche has more than 400 city properties that have been foreclosed upon and 14 servicing agents.

“None of them can be reached,” he said.

The ordinance, he said, “is not a panacea, but I think it’s the right direction.”

“They do have several million dollars in their reserve account and we’re in a very difficult situation where we’re literally paying overtime for  officers in district stations to staff theis type of large event,” he said during a meeting of the Common Council’s Finance and Personnel Committee. “If we charge the Milwaukee Brewers and we charge the Milwaukee Bucks and these other large organizations, one has to ask himself, why do we not charge them?”

The Milwaukee Brewers pay the city more than $1 million a year to for police services, he said. The Milwaukee Bucks also pay for police, as do other organizations. Milwaukee World Festival Inc., which operates Summerfest, does not pay, he said.

“We do receive a payment for the rent of the the land to World Festival — over a million dollars….That never had taken into consideration the costs of both police and fire services,” he said.

Police Chief Edward Flynn said the true costs of policing special events previously had been hidden because of the way the Police Department tracked them. Regular-duty personnel were assigned to the events, then officers on overtime were assigned to cover some of the regular-duty assignments in various police districts.

“THe Police Department overtime was jacking up in the districts,” he said. ”In the meantime, you didn’t see that the real cost wasn’t the police districts, it was the special events.”

Flynn said he revised the way special event assignments were tracked to better monitor the costs. So far this year, he said, the price tag was $575,000.

“This is how much the city spends to police these special events,” he said. ”Whether you decide we want to recover those costs some day is ultimately your call. You should know, as we look at Police Department expenditures, that a large percentage of those expenditures go to special events at which other people make a profit.”

On the other hand, kudos to Ald. Robert Bauman and his allies for pushing this issue, which so badly  needed to be addressed for so long. which the mayor declined to do for too long.

A wheel tax isn’t a bad solution — it just should not be the only solution. Ald. Michael Murphy had a better idea when he proposed the combination of a $10 wheel tax and significantly reduced special assessments for street repairs. That would ensure that non-profits and land-heavy businesses and absentee landlords share in the cost of street repairs. As it stands now, those entities may well escape paying their fair share.

The council also should have done more to protect itself from pent-up demand. The wheel tax-only funding source for street repairs removes any incentive for homeowners not to insist that their wrecked — or even mildly imperfect — streets be repaired immediately. People who pay the $20 and don’t get the repairs they feel they deserve will be angry; people who rejected repairs under the assessment system will want the repairs now that the assessments aren’t attached to them.

If aldermen think liquor licenses can be a problematic pain — they ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

And, of course, if the state provided adequate local transportation needs, the entire wheel tax debate would not even be necessary.

The street in front of my house sucks. It’s got all sorts of potholes and it is a really, really, rough ride. Now that the wheel tax has been adopted and my neighbors and I don’t have to worry about special assessments, we’d like the street rebuilt. Now. No? If we don’t get services for the money, why the hell are we paying that wheel tax? And why does street X get rebuilt before my street does? My street is just as bad.

I also wonder if the folks who rejected street projects because of the onerous special assessments will get another chance now that there aren’t going to be those assessments. The rules have changed, after all.

The assessments, as outrageous as they were, at least functioned to moderate folks’ desire to have their streets repaired so the Department of Public Works wasn’t overwhelmed with demand. Now that those special assessments are gone, it’s doubtful that will be the case. There still is not enough money to repair all the streets that need repairing, but there is no motivation any more for residents to limit their demands for street repairs.

Watch out, aldermen, you got what you wished for. By the way, Ald. Murphy, Pinecrest Street really is in sad shape….