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CITY MANAGER’S OFFICE
WEEKLY MEMORANDUM
TO: Mayor Rines, Councilors and Department Heads
FROM: Jeffrey Kobrock, City Manager
DATE: September 24, 2004
RE: Weekly Memo
Meetings for the Week of September 27, 2004
Waterfront Task Force Tues., Sept. 28, 7:00 pm, TBA
Planning Bd. Tues., Sept. 28, 6:30 pm, City Hall
Ambulance Adv. Bd. Wed., Sept. 29, 6:30 pm, City Hall
Council Meeting Thurs., Sept. 30, 7:00 pm, City Hall
Historic Preservation Fri., Oct. 1, 8:00 am, City Hall
1 % Tax Cap
In an effort to provide voters information, the Council has adopted a model budget for City services based on a 1% tax cap. Additionally, the Council adopted a resolution highlighting the negative impacts to both City services and education, and opposing the Tax Cap initiative on that basis. Elimination of local police and professional firefighting capacity as well as a 60% cut in overall City services, and at least a million dollar gap in the school budget (representing about 30 positions) are top line impacts. The entire analysis is posted at www.Gardinermaine.com. In fact,
a 1% Tax Cap button greets you at the homepage.
Pat Gilbert recently did some analysis of usage at www.Gardinermaine.com. The initial statistics are impressive. In the month of July, Gardiner had 15% more unique visitors than Augusta. Not only is Augusta three times the population of Gardiner leading to much heavier usage by residents alone, its information technology resources are very significantly more than Gardiner’s notably limited IT capacity, and
being the state capital attracts many visitors simply based upon that status. Additionally, each unique visitor came back 29% more often to Gardinermaine.com than Augusta’s site and total visitor sessions were 49% higher than at Augusta’s site. Clearly our site is heavily used and considered important by our audience. We will continue to analyze usage to better understand our strengths and weaknesses and use that information to make an even better site!
In this packet
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