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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Vegetation Management Program Cost Analysis March 30, 1990 by Jack Long Maintenance Planning Section The primary aim of this analysis is to examine, separate, and document the costs associated with the Vegetation Management Program's various management categories and to calculate an average City incurred cost for each of the various types of vegetation abatements enforced through this program. These per abatement costs will then serve as the starting point for restructuring the vegetation program's owner billing schedules. Such billing schedule restructuring has been called for by an independent hearings official hired by the City with concurrence from the City Attorney's Office. The secondary aim of this analysis is to calculate the average City incurred cost for each nuisance complaint or property that was inspected but not abated by the City. Since these costs are not currently being recovered through property owner billings, they will only serve to illustrate the expense the Vegetation Management Program must absorb for each enforcement operation "success ". By "success" we mean those vegetation nuisance enforcements that are ultimately resolved by the property owners themselves. The first step in this analysis calculates the average percentage of annual time the Vegetation Manager devotes to the operation and administration of the Vegetation Management Program. To this is added the time spent by the temporary summer aide. The resultant figure is total annual personal services time spent on this program. The next step breaks this total personal services time down between the 3 different management categories. This is accomplished by the use of an activity time matrix (Table I) that documents the average times involved in the performance of minor activities that, when taken together, make up the major enforcement operation functions of the program. The calculated totals of these activities, herein called function times, are then multiplied by the number of such enforcement functions performed during the 1989 calendar year. The resultant figures then give us the total time spent on each of the various functions for the entire year (Table II). Since these function times have been segregated into their respective management categories, the amount of annual operations time spent in each management category is easily derived by adding the annual function times within each category. Dividing this by the total of all the function times, we get the percentages of total program operations spent in each management category.