Question: What do you think local...

Question: What do you think local taxes should pay for?

BILL MASON

Supporter of City Council recall movements, member of the city’s Fire Department planning committee and a financial planner

Government should not be in the business of doing what people can or ought to do for themselves.

We can do a better job if we regionalize fire services. Two proposals that have been thought of are to merge with the West Covina Fire Department or use the county fire services.

There is a great deal of duplication of services. There are possibly six or seven libraries in Covina. The city has one. There’s a county one. There are libraries at each high school. The libraries should take advantage of economies of scale. This would reduce costs and improve services.

With parks and recreation it’s the same. We have many organizations to address the city’s recreation needs. And that’s assuming you believe that families are not capable of providing their own recreational services. If you assume other institutions must help, they are all around: churches, Scout troops, sports leagues, schools. The city duplicates those services and uses taxpayer money to compete with those organizations. That doesn’t make sense.

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HARRY BORAK

Chamber of Commerce president and owner of an insurance agency

Local taxes should pay for the services that are normally provided by city government: parks and recreation, fire and police, maintenance of streets and water lines and the library. The Covina utility tax is a necessity to pay the bills. But that’s not the long-term fix. The long-term fix is to get the state to give back the money it has taken away from Covina and every other city in the state.

The state should go back to the federal government to get funding for mandated expenses. It’s a chain reaction and cities are at the end of the line.

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KEN LAVOIE

Fire chief

Taxes should pay for those things necessary to give a quality of life to the citizens. And I don’t mean police or fire only.

Now there just ain’t resources to do the job people expect. We can do something about rising costs. For instance, everything with the fire area tends to be reactive: We put wet stuff on red stuff. But there needs to be proactive rules that say: If you build it, you protect it with sprinklers. Put the burden on the builder instead of the taxpayer. The builder can recover costs in a short time instead of a burden being put on the taxpayers forever, because I have to add firefighters and equipment due to an increase in new structures that can burn.

A lot of the rise of cost in services on a local level we’ve had no control over. There are pass-downs from the state, required services: everything from safety equipment to the size of our fire engines to training. We’ve absorbed the costs over the years. We should have been screaming louder.

CLARA RUCKMAN

Retired office manager, active member of Citizens Against the Recall Effort

I had to leave the council meeting the other night because my blood pressure got so high. I’m 73 and a heart patient and my doctor said I shouldn’t be so involved.

Our city’s problem is that we don’t have any money and we’ve got to figure out how to get some. Sometimes I think we should have a user tax. If you use it, pay for it. For instance, I haven’t been to the park in years.

My main concern is the police and fire departments. I do not want the city to go to the county for these services. I don’t think we’d save a dime. Anybody who has listened to the radio or television or read a newspaper knows the county is in bad shape. People I know say the utility tax is a small price to pay for what we have and want to keep.

Interviews by Berkley Hudson.