From Board of Estimates on Monday . . .
Budget
Salary Detail
Minor Objects
Capital Assets
Supplemental requests – none
Hightlights from budget
1. Funding for a summer prosecution intern.
2. Leaving vacant a 0 . 5 FTE Legal Secretary 2 position.
3. Savings due to replacing retired staff with entry – level positions
Presentation
Michael May, the City Attorney they are just continuing their budget, the total budget is abotu $30,000 less than it was for 2013, the primary savings is retirement of very senior people and the people coming in will be at much lower salaries. They had some small increases in expenditure for things like training and travel, memberships, copying, basically things where they were off consistently for year or where they have had to cut back and they wanted to get that back up, that was an increase in about 14,000. Inter-department billings was reduced for CDA because they were consistently below those inter-departmental billings.
Questions
Ledell Zellers asks if the reductions of interdepartment billings was all departments?
May says that it was not, it was enterprise funds and police and fire and that has something to do with the funds that we get back from the state. We get more money back from the state for providing those services so they try to allocate all costs to other department to get that up to where it reflects those costs.
Mike Verveer asks about the retirements of long term employees. He asks why the salary savings are still budgeted at 2%, will they have to hold vacancies in order to reach that since there is relatively low turn over.
May says that they are only not filling a half-time position that would support Diane Althouse in ordinance writing, but he thinks that is built in to the budget, it is not part of the 2% savings, he doesn’t anticipate having trouble reaching that but he says that is more applied city wide and some years there is more savings in some departments and so it works out city-wide.
Verveer asks if the retirements were several, not just the legal secretary>
May says it would also be Caroline Hogg, she was probably one of the highest paid city attorney’s we had.
Verveer asks if he is talking about retirements from this year?
May says yes, none expected next year. The savings are from the retirements this year.
And the retirement and sick leave payouts are all expenses this year?
May says yes.
Larry Palm asks about the legislative drafting assistance. He says there were some complicated ordinances that didn’t getthrough the ringer in the right way, will there be any impact keeping that position open.
May says that they haven’t filled that position for several years and the major impact is that sometimes when there is a crunch time that is a position not there t help us out, it would also be significant if Ms. Althouse were to retire because they wouldn’t have anyone trained there, but he doesn’t anticipate any change because of that. That position they haven’t been able to find money to fill that position for several years.
