I think Mark Clear and Judy Compton just launched class warfare (or at least threw more fuel on the fire in the neighborhoods vs business community flames) with their budget amendment that will be discussed at Board of Estimates on Monday at 4:30. I’m afraid the vote will be 4 – 2. Or 3 -3 and the Mayor would break the tie.
THE AMENDMENT
Here’s a good indication of what has happened to our city. As if the Edgewater and the development review process to “streamline” the development process wasn’t enough, check out this amendment.
Mark Clear and Judy Compton have proposed the following amendment . . .
Provide funding to the Office of Business Resources to market and manage the BioAg Gateway and BioLink projects, and reduce funding for Community Services provider contracts commensurately.
$144,000 is added to Consulting for Economic Development, $144,000 taken from “Comm. Agency Contracts.”
WHAT WOULD THE MONEY COVER
Remember the press conference the Mayor held where he said he was helping neighborhoods? (Actually, he did it twice, first for the bogus Capital Budget press conference and then for the Operating Budget press conference.) He was adding $200,000 in the Community Services Budget for neighborhoods.
Well, because of a whole bunch of changes in how they fund non-profits and changing priorities (see background info below), that $200,000 would either cover a majority of the $223,288 needed to get several agencies back to their 2010 funding levels which some alders are likely to put in an amendment for or it would cover the “B list” of agencies that the Community Services Commission would like to fund. (See problems with the “B list” below.)
Or, it could go to fund the new programs in the Workforce Development category that is new this year. Which took 7 – 15% of the funding that previously went to other priorities and is at least $240K, and if I added it up its about $437K that is going into Adult Workforce Preparedness/Employment. Up until this year, it was always considered the “county responsibility” for these types of programs. Funny, I haven’t heard the mayor utter a word about the city taking on the county responsibilities in this area. See below for more info on this.
WHO IS IMPACTED?
This could impact neighborhood centers, planning councils, childcare and youth programs, literacy programs and just about anyone who serves the elderly, disabled, LGBTQ community, low-income persons along with sexual assault and domestic abuse programs. The process the Community Services has gone through this year has been partially made up along the way, and as a result, any agency that is funded has reason to be worried. I honestly don’t think they would take money away from agencies they said they would fund, but you just never know. Especially because the council could redirect the money if they so choose. The agencies in the lists above are probably most impacted. But there are many other good programs out there that are also impacted. Many are listed here, before the final decisions.
WHY THIS TIMING IS SO BAD
Agencies haven’t been getting adequate COLA (cost of living adjustments, see below for explanation) increases for years from most funding sources. Now, the economy is putting pressure on the agencies to serve more people. For a while, to meet the increasing demands some agencies had some stimulus money from state and federal sources, but that will now be going away. And, for many of us, fundraising and earned income (example: Tenant Resource Center sells books about tenant/landlord law and teaches seminars around the state – that income is half of what it used to be) is down due to the economy and people cutting back. This is really a perfect storm for many groups, some of which have been struggling for years.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
This is amendment 25 which will be discussed at Board of Estimates at 4:30 on Monday. They have 28 amendments. I haven’t seen the agenda yet, because it comes out on Friday, after noon, but I suspect the meeting will be in room 260 of the Municipal Building. And I suspect there will be plenty of testimony, so you can show up later and still speak.
Or, you can start emailing your alders RIGHT NOW. allalders@cityofmadison.com Please include your address so the alders know what district you live in and put in your own words why this is important to you. Ask your friends and family to do the same.
Board of Estimates votes are crucial, here are the Board members and their emails, you may want to send them a more personal email, especially if you live in their district or have a connection to them:
Mark Clear district19@cityofmadison.com (likely yes vote, since his name appears first as main sponsor)
Tim Bruer district14@cityofmadison.com (unknown)
Mike Verveer district4@cityofmadison.com (likely no vote)
Jed Sanborn district1@cityofmadison.com (unknown)
Joe. Clausius district17@cityofmadison.com (unknown)
Satya Rhodes Conway district12@cityofmadison.com (likely no vote)
Mayor David J. Cieslewicz mayor@cityofmadison.com (unknown)
I’m predicting 4 – 2, or 3 -3 tie and I don’t know what the Mayor would do, but hopefully stick up for his own budget . . . but I’m not confident he will.
OTHER AMENDMENTS
More information on budget amendments here.
BACKGROUND, THE CONTROVERSIES/ISSUES ON THE PROCESS
The promise of COLA.
Why does COLA, or cost of living adjustment, important. Well, agencies have to pay the bills. They need staff to do the work and coordinate volunteers and do the fundraising/grant writing. They have to pay for health care and rent, office supplies and wage increases, utilities and printing, etc. All those costs don’t stay the same from year to year. In fact, with wages, we have to increase them to make sure all our staff are making a living wage each year. The COLA increases we have gotten are typically only every other year or not at all depending upon the funding source. So, we’ve cut, become more efficient, cut and became more efficient, to the point there is just nothing left. But our health care costs and wages and rent and supplies all still go up. Agency staff work harder and longer hours because they are dedicated to the mission of their organizations, but don’t get compensated for it.
The Community Services Commission used to have a strong commitment to keeping the non-profits in the city as strong as they could with their meager funding. They took the position that keeping COLAs in their budget and cutting a program that was a lower priority was a kinder way to do business instead of death by a thousand cuts. I guess times have changed. We’re back to death by 1000 cuts.
Adding insult to injury. Politicians often like to talk about the non-profits as “sharing the pain” with government offices. Well, that’s not a fair comparison. Wages and benefits are not considered equally in these comparisons. Government offices get their step increases and longevity pay increases and benefits, while the cuts to non-profits don’t make those same adjustments. Our cuts are not just to non-wage/benefits costs, but to all costs, so the cuts are deeper.
New priorities.
Workforce development was a new category that was added to the funding priorities. They allocated 7 – 15% of all of their funding to this category. That 7% is about $240,000. I think they ended up at the high end, near 15% of funding that was essentially reallocated away from other programs. In my mind, that is the dollar amount that should have been added in the first place. That is what is causing so many of the cuts to the agencies, since there is new competition for the same amount of funding. So, our unending quest for economic development was what caused the initial lack of funding. I haven’t yet figured out how much ended up in that category as it is complicated. The numbers are often wrong or hard to follow and all in pdf format to make it harder for us to analyze the numbers, but my estimate is over $400K.
Prioritization process.
Several problems:
1. The committee took quite a few pains to set up an elaborate scoring process and decision making process to follow. Then, after scoring the applications, decided that the scores were only guidelines and they didn’t really need to follow the scoring. So, they didn’t fund the agencies according to the scoring system. Can you imagine if they did this with any other RFP process, the city would be getting sued by the businesses that didn’t get the contracts.
2. After they determined which agencies were the top agencies they wanted to fund, they made a “B list”. The “B list” was determined in each of 7 categories of funding. Some were done by various committees (Early Childhood, Seniors, Conference Committee and Community Services Commission). Each group did it differently. Some added more to the B list than other groups. There were no guidelines, so some groups got more of their agencies onto the “B list” – making the process seem completely unfair.
3. The “C List” was another list where they randomly chose groups they wanted to get funding. They had originally set aside 5% of their funding for adjustments. They had no process to put the groups on this list. It was just whatever someone called out, got put on the list. They made many motions (minutes here) until they got to the point where they agreed on who would get that 5% of the funding.
So, now we have a “B list” (which is really the “D list”) of agencies that were unevenly considered and some were randomly pulled off of, and the Community Services Committee, while acknowledging the process wasn’t perfect, decided that they weren’t going to go back and open it up, because they didn’t feel they could take funding away from groups that already got it and they didn’t have time to do it right.
Which leads us back to the beginning . . . and a question of how much money is needed, where it should be spent and what will happen if the funding goes away. This process was a mess to begin with, this amendment, makes it worse.
PLEASE HELP
Please help. Please email allalders@cityofmadison.com, email your individual alder, email the Board of Estimates alders, show up to the meeting. Call someone you know connected to one of the non-profits connected and ask how you can help. Tell them that we need this funding for all the community groups, that serve a wide variety of people in the city under increasing pressure from increased needs and faltering funding. We not only need this $144,000, we need to make sure the non-profits have the resources necessary to do their work, or it will have negative consequences throughout the community, including adding more burden to the police department. Cutting community services that work hand in hand with our police department to make sure we have a good quality of life for high end tech jobs, are those the priorities?
When and where is the meeting?