Let there be war!
Last night Pat Roller, city controller, gave a PowerPoint presentation to city council as a preface to their work on the budget. Discussions have begun long ago, but the formal process is now underway and the next step will be a meeting next Thursday, October 1st.
Liz Brown was appointed by council president Tom Smith to manage the process and will chair the meetings. That, itself, could be the topic of a long dissertation, but in short, Brown has been the most critical of personnel costs, scrutinizes cost details of many projects, but seems quite angry when someone else criticizes expenditures she favors. It should be a lively discussion.
So, last night Pat Roller, the controller, presented the PowerPoint. It was hard to follow on screen, but even harder to follow if 1) you listened to her narration, and 2) you were not her. Unless you were a veteran of these discussions, as only a few people in Fort Wayne are (oh, where is Don Schmidt when we need him most!) it would have been impossible to glean much value from her presentation.
She essentially presented the income side and the expense side with graphs to explain some of the trends. Unfortunately, when questioned by council on details she was often unable to directly answer, or perhaps she did not want to. “It is clear we have work yet to do in that area,” was a phrase she used more than a few times to describe why she could not clearly answer a councilmember’s question.
There have been a significant number of changes in sources of funding and how city dollars may be spent. She spoke to that last night. The city proposes to give every employee a raise of a bit over one percent. They received no raise last year, but the city thinks they can find the money, a million and a half, the same amount they wasted on Calhoun Street, to fund the raises. One council member has already questioned how raises can be promised in this economy with revenue prospects sliding.
Roller also noted that there are problems all across the board in the revenue sources, with the diminishing property tax base, and with expenditures, as an example the growing and unpredictable expenses that may be charged against the city’s self-insurance program.
Controller Roller has a tight wire to walk. She will have to justify every line in the budget in the coming weeks and she will have to strongly defend the administration’s proposed pay raise. After all, she said, personnel costs are the vast majority, some 70 percent, of the city’s budget. Given the economy, given the unemployment rate, give that many, many people in the city are clinging to their jobs it seems council will target personnel costs as the way to bring the budget into balance. Tom Henry would prefer to offer his troops a raise and then let the nasty members of city council cut it down or eliminate it.
It was interesting last night, frequently during Controller Roller’s presentation council members would get up for coffee, to call home, to chat with constituents. Others showed great intensity in trying to follow her logic. That logic was simple: ramble, side-step, delay. Let the wars begin.
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