City Services
Cityhood propoents often cite improvements in police services, better roads, and local control of planning and zoning as reasons why El Dorado Hills needs to become a city. Let’s take a closer look at these three city services and see why its unlikely that cityhood would imrove any of these services.
Partial list of police services:
- Traffic Enforcement
- Accident investigation and recontruction
- School resource officers
- SWAT team
- K-9 team
- Air patrol
- Marine patrol
- Dive team
- Crime scene investigators
- Detectives
- Bomb squad
- Dispatch
- Records and evidence management
- Narcotics squad
- Homeless outreach team
- Coroner
These are all services currently provided by CHP or the Sheriff’s deparment that must be accounted for when contracting for service for the new city. Cost estimation for these services is difficult as most of these services are only on an “as needed” basis.
Police Services
Police services are a lot more than just the cop on the beat. The PCFA does a pretty good job of describing the not-so-common police services currently available to El Doroado Hills and services that the new city must provide. Unfortunately, it is not clear that expenses for these services were carried forward to the budget analysis. The analysis assumes that the city will contract out for police services, just as Rancho Cordova does now. It is assumed that services will be provided by the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office or the Folsom Police department.
The PCFA estimated annual expenses for police services at $11,080,000 each year for five years with no accounting for inflation, increase in popluation, or additional services. The expense was calculated by taking the overall El Dorado County Sheriff budget and dividing the cost by the poplulation of El Dorado Hills. This would simply reflect the cost for maintaining the currect service level, neglecting the fact that the new city would also have to provide traffic enforcement. CHP does not provide traffic enforcement to incorporated cities. The cost does not reflect the improved law enforcement services promised by the proponents of cityhood.
As opposed to the PCFA per capita approach to cost estimation, another approach would be to calculate a cost per police employee based on current budgets. The table below presents a comparison of police budgets for FY 23-24. Information for the table came from each city budget document and census data for population and area.
The average cost per department employee runs in the $485,000 to $525,000 range. If this cost seems high, it is because the cost includes personnel, vehicles, equipment, maintenance, and all costs covering the services shown in the list on the left. Lincoln is an outlier because their police department does not offer the full range of services as the other communities. In calculating the El Dorado City cost, we used a cost per employee on the low end, $480,000. We estimated a budget of 12,500,000 versus the PCFA cost of $11,080,000. Even so, the budget only provides for 26 personnel which is low in comparison with other departments with a similar population and area. As a reminder, the employee count includes all employees, including patrol officers, helicopter pilots, detectives, vehicle mechanics, evidence techicians, dispatch, and others.
Road Fund
The PCFA used property tax and gas taxes to estminate the funding available for city road maintenance and repair. The estimate only provided a dollar amount and did not analyze what that dollar amount represents in actual road repair.
The table below uses the PCFA dollar amounts, the number of lane miles to be maintained and the average costs of maintenance and repaving.
Maintenace cost of $13,968 per lane mile was obtained the annual highway report from the Reason Foundation. The average cost to repave was calculated using the average per mile of the five most recent El Dorado Hills repaving projects, El Dorado Hills Boulevard, Green Valley Road, and the Governors Area repave projects. Based on these projects, it costs $370,889 to repave and re-mark one lane mile.
The PFCA estimated between $5.2 and $5.8 million would be available per year for road maintenace. Costs for road maintence over the five year span would range from approximately $4.3 to $5.2 million using our 3.8% inflation factor. The bottom row of the table shows that this would allow for 2.7 to 1.8 miles of road to be repaved each year. Maintenance could be delayed to allow for more repaving, but overall, the numbers don’t look good. Unless the PFCA failed to account for additional road funding or grants, the city would soon experience substantial road maintenance issues.
Planning and Zoning
The ability to control city planning and zoning was pitched as an important benefit of cityhood. However, the currently-proposed city boundaries omit the El Dorado Hills Industrial Park and the Marble Valley CSD from the area of incorporation. Most of the remaining area of the proposed city is already built out. Consequently, there is not much left to plan and zone.
During the cityhood discussions, it was mentioned that if El Dorado Hills were a city when the Project Frontier Amazon warehouse was being presented, a local El Dorado Hills city zoning commission could have rejected the project immediately. The Project Frontier footprint is outside of the proposed area of incorporation, so a local zoning board would not have been much help.