No Department Gets a Blank Check
Public safety comes first. That does not make it untouchable.
Opinion Piece
Mark Mezzano, candidate for City Council, has drawn a hard line. Public safety, he says, is off limits for budget cuts. At the Chamber of Commerce forum on September 16, he refused to put police and fire on the table and instead pointed to park promises and other spending. He is not the only candidate talking that way.
The priority is right. The blank check is not.
A city has three basic jobs, in this order: public safety, public infrastructure, and public health and welfare. Police, fire, and 911 come first, because nothing else works if people do not feel safe. Roads, water, sewer, and storm drains come second, because a town that cannot move goods or keep the taps running is not open for business. Health programs, housing services, and recreation come third. They matter. They are not why a city was chartered.
Priority is not the same as immunity.
Redding’s own efficiency review makes that plain. Circle 6 found that Fire Department labor cost about $10.9 million in fiscal year 2024-25. Overtime alone was $4.65 million, against a budget of about $2.23 million. More than double what was planned. Consultants said the overtime is built into the schedule, not reserved for bad fire seasons. Compensatory time off feeds the same loop: hours earned at premium pay have to be covered later at premium pay. Cutting or ending that practice could save as much as $2.6 million a year.
That is not an attack on firefighters. It is a warning about a staffing plan the city cannot afford. Three people on an engine is a service level. Four and a half million dollars in unbudgeted overtime is a habit. A noble mission does not make the habit sustainable.
Public health and welfare is a different story, and candidates rarely say so. Much of the homelessness response, housing work, and community services in California cities is already paid for with state and federal grants, not with the local dollars that also have to pave streets and staff a night shift. Use those grants. Do not treat them as proof that the general fund owes every program a permanent local match. When Sacramento or Washington pulls back, Redding should not discover it has quietly adopted the whole bill. Instead, the City Council should be focused on accountability and making sure funds are spent effectively, regardless of the source.
The rest is arithmetic. Mezzano himself said, while he was still on the council, that the city was broke and that directors had been told to cut. The Citizens spoke loud and clear when the sales-tax increase failed. Personnel costs are up. Sales tax is flat. The general fund brings in a little over $31 million a year in sales tax. That is the checking account. It does not grow because a candidate declares a department sacred.
So the rule should be simple. Staff public safety before parks, promotions, and new programs. Maintain roads and pipes before amenities. Keep grant-funded health and welfare programs only as far as the grant, plus a modest local share, will carry them.
After that, every department lives inside the number, including police and fire. Vacant jobs stay vacant if filling them blows the budget. Contracts get reopened when premium pay becomes the business model. No layoff is the goal, but no department or city job is safe when the budget is upside down.
What this race is missing is the other half of the ledger.
Almost nobody running is talking seriously about revenue that does not start with another tax. Mayor Mike Littau has floated a “Redding 100K” push to grow the city toward 100,000 people and widen the tax base. That is a mayor’s speech without a plan. On the forum stage, the field has been quicker to name what it will protect than what it will build.
Redding is about 94,000 people spread over a large map. It cannot pave every mile and staff every station on a sales-tax stream that barely moves. The fix is more residents, more storefronts, and more reasons for people who already live in the county to spend their money inside the city limits.
That means clearing the obstacles the council actually controls. Permits that take long enough to kill a small project. Impact fees that only a well-funded builder can absorb. Zoning written for a bigger city. Empty ground in Stillwater and along the river sits because the city is a slow, incompetent partner. A downtown and a Hilltop worth the drive. Housing a working family can buy, so the new hire stays in Redding instead of commuting in from Anderson or Palo Cedro and taking the sales tax with them.
Public safety is part of that offer. So are decent roads. A town people are afraid to open a shop in will not grow its way out of a deficit. Neither will a town that spends the growth on overtime before the first new rooftop is occupied.
Mezzano is right that the city has to rank its work. He is wrong if that ranking becomes a wall around one department. The next council should put safety first, infrastructure second, and health and welfare third — and then balance the budget anyway. It should spend at least as much time on who moves here, who opens here, and who spends here as it spends on what it refuses to cut.
The checking account does not care which candidate called a budget sacred.
