The vast majority of city expenses are for recurring, mundane, predictable things such as salaries, utility bills, fuel, insurance, and the maintenance, repair, and replacement of physical assets.  Physical assets, whether they are streets or vehicles or police radios or staff computers or whatever, all have reasonably foreseeable service lives, and reasonably effective models can be built to guide maintenance, repair, and recapitalization decisions.  Perhaps, for example, the average useful life of a police cruiser is 5 years assuming that all routine servicing is performed as scheduled.  Or the average life of an asphalt street might be 20 years, assuming again that crack sealing and pothole maintenance are performed as scheduled.  The point isn’t what the numbers are—it’s that there are numbers, and the people responsible for those services can reasonably be expected to know and use them to forecast their financial requirements.  Same for salaries, utility bills, insurance, whatever other normal and recurring expenses the city has.  All of that “cost of doing business” information is or should be well-known and well-documented, and those costs make up the vast majority of the city’s total expenses.

Since that type of cost information is or should be available, city leadership and management has the direct responsibility to use it to effectively plan future-year financial requirements and advocate for those requirements to the public.  

I do not mean to suggest we should not simultaneously work to lower the cost of the services and materials the city needs to purchase.  Absolutely the city leadership and management should work to optimize those costs relative to performance standards over the long term.  Perhaps we should now be paying a very competent attorney and city staff to research and prepare for future labor contract negotiations.  Or perhaps there are new types of street-maintenance materials or equipment that would have lower life-cycle costs relative to performance requirements, or perhaps we could work with nearby cities to leverage buying power and negotiate lower prices from vendors for common purchases.  I'm just making up those examples, but the point is that yes, certainly, the city should actively work to control costs relative to performance rather than just assuming costs cannot be controlled.

But in the meantime, unless and until something is actually changed, the current requirements are still requirements.  The fact that fuel and petroleum-based products cost a lot more than they did three years ago has nothing to do with the rate at which asphalt pavement deteriorates if it doesn’t receive appropriate maintenance.  As a taxpayer, I don’t want to have to pay the city more money to maintain the streets just because petroleum prices have gone up.  But more than that, I don’t want to have to pay the city a lot more money in the long run to replace pavements or police cars or snowplows more often than ought to be necessary, because we couldn’t “afford” to maintain them properly.  If the city can find a way to still meet performance requirements at less cost, by all means do it.  But until that new process is in place, or those new labor contracts are negotiated, or that new wonder material comes into the inventory, the cost of the existing requirement is still the requirement.

An earnings tax offers Beavercreek the potential for a greater revenue stream, at less cost to Beavercreek residents, with which to fund those well-documented and clearly-justified requirements.  

If earnings tax revenues exceed the total collected from voted city levies, property owners will get a very significant relief (100% of the voted city levies) and the City will get the net growth over and above current funding levels.  If earnings tax revenues don’t in fact exceed property tax revenues, property owners will still get some relief and the City will have the same level of funding as before.

As discussed above, the majority of city expenses are for requirements which will exist each and every year and can be predicted with reasonable accuracy.  There is no doubt that in 2010 or 2012 or any other year, the city of Beavercreek will need to maintain streets and provide police services.  Within a fairly small range of variation, the costs of doing so can be accurately predicted.  The life-cycle costs of any system are lower if the proper level of investment is made in preventive maintenance and timely repair.  It is therefore in the city’s best interest, and the best interest of the taxpayers, to have a stable revenue stream that supports that optimum life-cycle level of investment.

Income tax revenues as a class are more stable than short-term property tax revenues, because they do not depend on voter re-approval every few years.  That stability gives city leadership and management the capability (and therefore the responsibility) to plan and manage investment decisions on a long-term rather than short-term basis.

Some citizens believe that very stability to be a negative rather than positive factor.  Their belief is that if public officials misbehave and do stupid things with public money, we voters can punish them and save money by turning off a tax levy at the next election.  That belief is a powerful political force, but it is not an effective system of checks and balances.  The theory suffers from several serious practical flaws.

4.  The lack of a local income tax reduces the city's ability to attract balanced growth.  

That doesn’t mean that property tax abatements should be offered in every case or in any specific case—just that it’s a tool that could be used if the circumstances warranted it.  Like any tool, it’s not a magic solution and the city would still have the responsibility to use it wisely, and the business involved would have to agree to the deal.  Whether it made sense in any given situation would depend on the details.  But without an earnings tax, Beavercreek doesn't even have the tool.