Donald Glasgow, San Clemente
Lately, I and many other citizens of San Clemente have begun hearing more and more about our many problems and challenges from the candidates running for City Council.
There tends to be an overabundance of issues ranging from San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), homelessness, hospital lawsuit, districting, employee morale, other lawsuits, a bureaucratic planning/permit department, sober living homes, citizen safety, toll road challenges, budget dilemmas and other matters that need to be dealt with.
For me, after sorting through these issues, I’m feeling that money in/revenue and, money out/expenses should be the No. 1 issue for all candidates to address. Without numerous creative ideas as to how to increase our city revenues, I’m doubting most of the issues being discussed can or will be resolved. Our city seems to have a serious cash flow challenge of late. Maybe it’s time to get more serious about our need for more revenue/money? I think so.
Let’s aggressively take care of existing businesses so that they can thrive, seek new revenue-producing businesses, get serious about economic development, introduce an aggressive visitor organization to help bring in more visitors to our city, who spend money at our stores, restaurants and a wide range of other services that produce sales-tax revenues for our city.
Can’t we as a city do a better job of totally embracing the Outlets at San Clemente to help them dramatically increase sales that will substantially increase our city sales-tax revenues? Why do we not have an important economic development outreach to attract more businesses to our city? What happened? We had this presence in the past and it worked. Let’s not wait for business and sales-tax revenues to come our way. Let’s reach out everywhere with more revenue-producing ideas.
In summary, it’s my sincere hope that this note resonates with everyone involved in the leadership of our city. More revenue/money in, less money/expenses out.
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