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2004 Workshop Reports -
Public Services Discussion Group
Background
Yellow Springs’ total population declined 5%
from 1990 to 2000, and declined 19% since 1970. The nature of service
demand is affected by changing demographics—an older, wealthier
population with an apparent growing number of singles in households.
Yellow Springs’ educated and professional constituency has also
likely affected the nature of service demand.
The Cost of Living report followed a tested
method, and therefore only included public utilities in the analysis
of public services. Yellow Springs’ costs for utility-related public
services compare well to other similar communities. Lower-cost
electric utilities offset other costs such as higher property taxes.
On March 27th , the Public Services Discussion
Group presented several interpretations of the definition of public
services. Part of the group felt that this definition of public
service needed to be highly inclusive and as broad as possible, while
other group members expressed more reservation about the definition.
Indeed, the group expressed that the task of listing such services
itself was one of the challenges. The group brainstormed a list of
services and discussed the need to categorize in terms of municipal
versus other; publicly-funded versus private:
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Recreation |
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Mediation |
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Police |
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Transportation |
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Fire |
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Senior Citizens- Nursing Care |
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EMS |
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Daycare |
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Utilities |
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General Health/Well-Being |
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Water/Sewer |
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Parks |
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Electric/Gas |
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Swimming Pool |
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Trash |
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Parking |
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Telephone |
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Postal Service |
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Cable/Broadband |
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Cultural Services
(Arts Council, Library, College) |
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Streets |
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Farmer’s Market |
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Mayor’s Court |
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The group determined that the following
challenges were the most pressing in terms of the needs of public
services.
Challenge 1: Prioritizing to make decisions
about reducing, eliminating, adding, or increasing services
The challenge is to determine which services
have the highest need, separating those that the municipality must
provide; while also determining those that could be slated to be
reduced or eliminated.
Action Plans Concepts
- Develop a time-line for creating a priority
list of services.
- Categorize all public services according to
revenue sources and responsibilities, so that decisions could be
made on the basis of discretionary services.
- Take the pulse of the village so that
decisions can be made with community input.
- Feeding information to the community
continually.
- Reaching out to everybody.
- Create a small task force to gather
community input to prioritize Yellow Springs’ government
services.
- Incorporate existing and/or developing
Village processes with this action planning effort, by working
with the Village Council as it implements a program for capturing
public input.
Challenge 2: How will these decisions about
these public services be made?
The challenge is to balance the maintenance,
inclusion, and/or increase of services that help make the community a
highly-desired place to live, with the need to preserve revenues so
that the required services are fully funded. The group did not create
action-plan concepts for this challenge.
Challenge 3: Bringing in new industries to
Yellow Springs, or creating them
The challenge is, again, to provide the level
of service that would make Yellow Springs a desired location for new
and developing industries, while maintaining revenues that could be
used toward the creation of new industry. The group did not create
action-plan concepts for this challenge.
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