Government

Section 3

A. Demographic and geographical boundaries

1a. There is one major Highway is Interstate 37 which leads to Interstate 10 and 35, which meet in San Antonio. Another major Highway is U.S. Highway 77 which links Corpus to the Rio Grande Valley. Highway 44 and 59 link the city to Laredo and Mexico.

1b. The city has a combined utility system consisting of water, storm water, wastewater and gas systems. The water system is drawn from the Nueces river basin and the Colorado river basin. The cities storm water collection system consists of 100 miles of major open drainage ditches as well as 600 miles of underground storm drainage pipes, along with curbs, gutters, manholes as other forms of drainage. Wastewater collection is provided within the city limits to more than 76,000 customers. Gas service is provided to 55,000 customers within a service territory of 180 square miles.

2. The majority of the cities population falls in the middle class. There is a large portion of lower class people and as well as a good population in the upper class with a handful of them being very wealthy. These upper class and wealthy help to bring in more revenues to the city.

3. By having a large population spread out over such a large area, the city has to spend large amount to keep the infrastructure in place and continuing to grow.

B. Government services that are performed are trash collection, housing and community development programs, public health care, animal control and care.

C. The enterprise activities that the city takes part of are their utilities. The future of these utilities have an increased usage in the years to come and with that will come future expenses for maintenance and expansion.

D. The city seems to be experiencing a nice growth rate, which leads one to believe that the city is pro growth and encourages business's to move to the city.

E. The mayor and three city council members are elected at large, and the remaining five city council members are elected through single member districts.

F. Political attitudes and intergovernmental relationships

1. The most common change in views towards the government are in what people expect to see from the government.

2. The city seems to hold a good relationship with legislature. This seems so since they are often able to get state funding when they need to.

3. The state and federal governments provide assistance to the city. This assistance comes in the form of aid to make improvements to the city.

4. There are additional costs from over lapping districts mainly dealing with tourism and tourist attractions as well as school systems. Both of these expenses are not fought since they both work to benefit the city.

G. The city has just implemented a Automated meter reading system. They have also installed the hardware that will allow them wireless technology.

H. With a major emphasis on education and learning, the city did increase its funding to the Corpus Christi public library foundation.

I1. The largest employers include the Corpus Christi Army Depot, The American Electric Power Texas Central Co, H.E.Butt Grocery Company. None of these employers are likely to leave the city. Moving the army depot would be a large undertaking and would close due to federal budget cuts. The other two employers are based out of Corpus.

I2. The major employers play a large role in the revenues of the city. The three major sources of revenue for the city are property tax, sales tax and hotel occupancy tax. This city relies on tourism heavily, which leads to hotels being on the prime property and paying high property taxes, a large number of people who visit the city shopping, driving up sales tax and creating hotel occupancy taxes when they stay. On average each year the city sees in increase in the amount of money that it spends to create and maintain new buildings and roads.

J. This issue is not addressed in the CAFR, but the information could be derived by looking at the amount of taxes that citizens are required to pay. ie, average income taxes and property taxes

K. The city issued several bonds in order to pay for improvements to the bay front, packary channel and building new jetties. The city also saw a decrease in revenue from its utilities due to an usually wet