The Mayor briefed some alders on the budget yesterday at noon, and it seems there is some confusion. Yes, this is going to be a bad budget year, but the agencies are NOT being asked to cut 5% and Community Services and CDBG got a cost of living increase (COLA).
Somehow, people got a little confused about the mayor’s budget instructions this year, or so we were told. There apparently is a little too much nuance in his instructions. He’s asking everyone to come up with a budget at cost to continue, with adjustments. Here’s some of those adjustments.
- Madison Metro got $1M extra in their budget for fuel costs.
- Fleet services got $750,000 extra in their budget for fuel costs.
- Office of Community Services got the 3% cost of living increase, but not the 4%.
- CDBG Office got a 3% cola increase, but only on the city funded portions (not state and fedral monies).
What he is saying is no new services unless you make cuts or find outside revenue sources. After that exercise is done, he wants a menu of choices to cut within budgets. Those choices should add up to 5% of the department budget. He also followed up by saying that departments can’t cut 5% and survive and that “everyone knows we won’t” cut 5% across the board. He’s simply looking for more options. And, he’s not accepting supplemental requests this year . . . unless the department makes cuts or comes up with outside revenue sources.
A few departments were exempt from this exercise. I don’t have a complete list but the following are exempt: Water Utility, Parking Utility, Landfill Utility. Most of them are utilities that keep their own profits within their department. However, the Stormwater Utility is not exempt because there may be ways to shift services that the city does to the Stormwater Utility budget.
Tim Gruber asked how we got into this situation – the explanation – goes something like this:
- Fuel costs are up $1.75 – 2M.
- Building permits are down $1.4M
- Debt Service is costing $6.2M (yes, we predicted that would happen!)
- Health Insurance up 10% (average of last few years)
- We have to pay for wage increases.
So, our budget goes up $24M (approx 10%) just to continue at current levels. That’s 15% increase on the levy and we are limited to 11.75%. The levy limit is higher than usual because of our TIF retirement last year. That is a 10% increase on the average house.
The Mayor has some tricks to use to get us down to being about $1.3M over the levy limit. But we’d still need to cut from cost to continue about $1.3M. In an over $200M budget, that should be manageable.
Unfortunately, this budget meeting was after the 3.5 hour meeting of the Early Childhood Care committee where we made about 6 – 7 failed motions before getting to the point where we could give the Mayor his options to cut 5%. It’s a painful exercise to go through. All of our calculations could be wrong, however, if the COLA is the 4% we were counting on instead of the 3% we worked towards.
My guess is that we will have to go more than three nights and well into the morning again. We’re trying to do things in advance to make sure that doesn’t happen, but I’m skeptical that we will succeed.
