Where did it say the savings is only gas?

soo if they cut down on mowing the only savings will be gas??? how about the people mowing the grass???? i bet they'll still get a check.

Right, because the only problem with city government is the greedy employees who *gasp* negotiated salaries and contracts and *gasp* expect the paper they signed to be honored by the other party! How could they possibly take such craven advantage of us?

what's even sadder than the lack of responses to the survey is the list of items the City included in the survey! Not one mention of actually spending less on salaries and/or benefits; only choices being cut services and/or increase taxes.

flick you don't even have a clue about the ice arena.

germancaveguy is correct that a wheel tax will be more regressive than the property tax overall. It's an example of a too-simple-by-half solution.
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doc0430, that tax includes equipment, fuel, and other expenses on top of the hourly wages and additional benefits paid. It's an aggregate cost factor. Clearly the team method will be more efficient in terms of transporting mowers and personnel, so you're just imagining that they are using "too many people". The actual man-hours are not going to change very much.
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When you have as much of a task as mowing all the parks (really, a subset of park grass) in the city, it's again a game of numbers. By reducing mowing from (I forget the original, assume weekly) to every EIGHT days you immediately gain a savings of something like 15% (1/8) as you may be able to reduce mowing from 16 times a season to 14 times. But cutting mowing in half is going to mean a lot of long, unkempt grass, so the city may not in the end want to go that far, despite a 50% savings. You would want to make sure you were able to actually get something out of that e.g. preventing reductions in parks or public works maintenance.
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As for the parking lots, how do you propose, exactly, to have the businesses pay? Force them to buy the parking ramp over the river, the new parking garage, or the street parking space in front of their building? What legal mechanism do you think exists for doing that? (A Business Improvement District actually would provide one funding source, but the property owners rejected that.) Chew on that one and get back to me when you have an idea how to do it. Boy, some of you people really are thick. This is PUBLIC PARKING for a reason. What's stupid is the mall or Wal-Mart paving over acres of farmland so they own their own parking. That's the problem, not the solution. That costs society (including taxpayer investment) much more in the long run because it's a much less efficient use of services (e.g. sewer lines or streets measured by the foot).

Mowing: 83 percent of respondents would decrease mowing to once every two weeks for a savings of $79,534. Wow, that seems awfully high, where does a person sign up for that job? From the photo used here it appears that the city may be paying too much because they are mowing with teams, too many people getting paid to do the job of one, maybe two people, not to mention that when it's a group mow, how much time is spent sitting and chatting it up all on the cities dime??
Parking lots downtown that businesses use for their customers should be paid for by those businesses and not by the rest of the city! That one seems to be a no-brainer to say the least, I for one am shocked and appalled to find this out, how many other city services are being abused like this?

I really hope that the whole idea of a wheel tax being implemented doesn't take place. Granted, on the surface, the situation seems fair. Yet when you look at the numbers, and the manner of how this will be implemented, the amount of tax most people pay will go up.

The reason I say taxes for most will go up is that even if this tax were to raise $500,000 in revenue for the city, the numbers only lower taxes for the highest value properties. At $500,000, with a property base of $4 billion, the mil rate will only drop by .0125. Essentially, this means that on a $200,000 property, there will only be a savings of $2.50 on the property tax bill. So, with most home owners having at least one vehicle, they will be paying even more money to the city to keep using the property they own. In fact, this cost begins to dramatically increase with multiple vehicles.

On the other hand, a large business will likely save 10 times the amount or more that a home owner would. Yet, given the fact that most of these properties rely on deliveries made by large trucks that are an even greater contributor to road wear, I disagree with this approach. To have the heaviest users of our city streets paying the least seems backward to me.

Essentially, all that will come from implementing a wheel tax here in Janesville is a shifting of where the money comes from. Quite frankly, this is wealth redistribution in disguise. One more attempt to balance the cost of government on the backs of the working class.

I did it- yes sad only 1.25% of 63k people responded.

784 people responded to Janesville's "Budget Scorecard" online. Huh. Seems we could have done better than that.