Beverly Hills City Treasurer Howard Fisher has filed paperwork to run for reelection for his third and final term. Fisher has served in the position since 2017.
Speaking to the Courier, Fisher said that if reelected, his goals for his next term would include institutionalizing zero-based budgeting and focusing City Council’s attention on fiscal issues. He added that overall, he believes the city is doing well financially.
“In my almost nine years, we’ve never lost money on any investment, which I’m proud of,” he said. “We’re in good shape there; we’re in good shape with the long-term pension and benefit obligations…we’ve been paying down a substantial amount of the pension deficit, and maybe in another 10 years will be fully caught up like most cities, so we’re in really good shape.”
Fisher said that implementing zero-based budgeting, which assigns a specific purpose to every dollar spent instead of adjusting spending based on revenue and expenses from previous months or years, would force the city to take a closer look at its financial decision-making.
“The way we do budgets now, the way a lot of companies do, and most cities do, it’s an additive process,” he said. “We look at last year’s budget and we say, ‘What new tasks do we have? What tasks have we completed? Let’s add or subtract.’ But it’s always a given that we start with last year’s budget.”
Instead, under zero-based budgeting, the city would consider its spending more critically and reassess line items on a more regular basis. For example, Fisher said, a city’s public works department might reexamine its trash routes or street sweeping schedules.
The goal, he said, is increased efficiency in addition to financial savings.
“It’s a big undertaking,” said Fisher. “You don’t do it across all departments, and you don’t do it every year, but maybe you’ll do a department every year, thinking about whether there is a better way [to do things]…you build that into the process instead of saying, ‘We’ll just throw more money at it.'”
Citing his accomplishments over the past nine years, Fisher said he’s most proud of encouraging City Council to take a more in-depth look at financial issues such as hotel occupancies based on their transit occupancy tax (TOT) reports.
“We get a TOT report on the dozen or so hotels [in the city]…for a long time, people weren’t looking at these 60, or 80-90-page reports we’d be getting from our consultants, and so I started looking at all these things,” Fisher said.
Currently, projections show that the city will face a budget deficit in the coming years. Fisher noted that the deficit is now “not quite as big as it was being projected,” and said his role in managing the issue, since he does not vote on the budget, will be to continually focus city officials’ attention on issues that could cause problems.
For example, he noted that summer tourism from the Middle East has declined since the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in less revenue from shopping, hotel stays and restaurant bills. Some of that decline has been compensated for by Southern California locals who book staycations, renting a bungalow or room for several nights.
Fisher said that while those staycations help fill hotel rooms, they do not provide the same amount of revenue as “the Middle East contingency,” who frequently produced high restaurant bills and shopping tickets.
Since the city receives one penny on every dollar spent in sales tax, those revenues have gone down. However, Fisher said, “Sales have still been strong. You don’t have to sell very many Ferraris or Rolls-Royces or diamonds” to see an impact from sales tax.
A tax and business attorney specializing in planning, transactions and litigation, Fisher previously served on the city’s Planning and Public Works Commissions. He graduated from the University of Southern California and received his J.D. from Southwestern University. A member of the Beverly Hills High School (BHHS) class of 1969, he has been married to his wife Francine since 1976.
Their two sons are graduates of Beverly Vista Middle School and BHHS.
“I grew up here, I live here, I work here,” Fisher said. “My wife worked here … my boys both went to Beverly. I went to Beverly. So, this is truly home.”
There are no challengers in the race for city treasurer. Fisher will appear on the ballot in the city’s June 2 election.
