Budget Tidbits: The first half of the first hearings

October 9, 2007 11:17 am

Last night, the Board of Estimates started the annual questioning of staff about the Operating Budget. Here’s some of the things I learned or heard and some observations:

General Overview

There is a 6% increase in the budget over last year. History is that typically we have a 4 – 7% increase, so we are on the higher end of things.
The 3.9M in TIF funds that we put into the budget is not dedicazted to any one program or service, but goes into the general fund. So, next year we will hae some more money to put in, but in two years, we will be short $3.9 in the general fund. It’s rather short-sighted and not sustainable.
The Council can only add $109,000 before we go over our state limits and lose state funds.

Municipal Court

Is concerned about the impact that 30 new police officers will have on their workload.

Attorney

Is concerned about the impact that 30 new police officers will have on their workload.

Assessor

They need another manager position in their office that was not funded. As is, staff have unequal workloads and we have one person who oversees both Residential and Commercial assessments.

Clerk

They still aren’t filling a vacancy in their office, so all the things they told the Council they would get to as soon as they filled that position will be further delayed.
They spend $10,000 printing Council Packets for some of the Council members and various City staff and the Mayor’s office. Psssst. There’s this thing called the internet, you don’t need to print all that paper!

Treasurer

Credit card transactions cost us alot of money, a little under 2% of every transaction.
This year there will be a “convenience fee” for those who pay their taxes with a credit card. However, if you pay by check by phone, there will be no fee.

Information Technology

In the age of technology, we have ZERO wireless accounts in the City. They asked for 100, but only 1/3 or so got funded and the police will likely get them. Others who could use them in their field work and the Common Council will have to wait. (Some of us don’t have the City pay for a wireless connection due to ethics issues that we couldn’t find a work around.)

Human Resources

Leave the new guy alone. He doesn’t know. He didn’t write this budget.

Overture Center

The amount of money we give them is given under contract and we can’t effect it very much.

Monona Terrace

They’re still very excited and getting extra business because they are the first convention center in the United States that is LEED certified. It took 22 month and 1500 staff hours to make this happen.

Room Tax Fund

Last year we raised the room tax from 8% to 9% and there doesn’t seem to be an efffect on the hotel industry, even tho that was the concern at the time.
Um . . . . we signed a 5 year contract with the Greater Madison Convention and Visitors Bureau but it never went through the Council process. Why?
Hotels don’t seem to be suffering much in this economy. The biggest issue is competition from other areas.

Library

Despite the fact that low-income neighborhoods have higher demands on library use, especially for internet access, they are some of the libraries that have the lowest number of hours of service. The South Madison and Hawthorne Library are only open 45 hours while others are open 58 hours per week. The request to have those libraries open longer hours was not put into the Mayor’s budget.

Fire

There were some curious non-answers. Chief Amesqua basically just nodded her head and said yes, this is what the Mayor wanted in the budget. As if she couldn’t contradict the Mayor and tell us what she really needed.
The Fire Department doesn’t have contracted overtime like the police department does. The police department staff get paid 15 minutes of overtime everytime they show up for work.
They didn’t get their medical supplies for the ambulances funded in the amount they need. Again.
The Mayor cut their AASPIRE intern.

Police

Again, just like the first department, some curious non-answers. And didn’t want to contradict the Mayor in public, especially regarding the annual report that they didn’t have input into.
They are coming up with some benchmarks to measure their success with 30 new officers, but they don’t know if they want us to put them in the budget and hold them to it.
1.9 officers per 1000 is not a generally accepted standard in policing, however, it seems that they didn’t use that number to determine how many officers they needed. It just happened to work out to be about that amount. Hmmmm . .. . .
They have looked at going to 10 hour shifts and there are some plusses and minuses to that more flexible scheduling.

Senior Center

No silly coffee urn debate this year. (That made Zach’s face turn red!)
They are celebrating their 25th anniversary in 2008.

Community Services

How very interesting. We talked to them for about an hour about outcomes and measurements, however, no other departments were asked about outcomes and measurements.
There is a complete and total misunderstanding about the priority setting process that the committees go through every year.
It seems while alders want them to have more flexibility, they also don’t want to give them discretion.
There is a complete and total misunderstanding about what it means to cut a program and the impacts it has on an organization. Some think it is ok if they just go out of business. This fails to realize how hard it would be to find another organization to provide similar services and the start up costs.
There is a complete and total misunderstanding about COLA increases and why they are important.
Alders are framing the discussion to imply that there is something wrong, so that they can merge the CDBG and Office of Community Services offices.
It’s ok to pick on new people when they work in Community Services.
This is a whole other blog, as the discussion lasted nearly an hour and the comments were staggering.

The process where we call in all the department and division heads to answer questions for the Board of Estimates is not a good process for the Council. Many alders, while they showed up, left without asking any questions. This was likely because there weren’t enough chairs at the table and there wasn’t a clear process for non-BOE alders to ask questions. Also, I don’t think some of them realized that the past tradition is that you just come up to the table and sit there. This Mayor introduced a practice of calling on all the BOE people first, then the other alders could ask questions. So its not a very inviting atmosphere to ask questions. Additionally, we’ve had the budget for just under a week and I don’t think many alders read it or even figured out what their questions were. Clearly, this meeting is kind of early in the process.

And finally, Mayor gets cranky and starts cutting people off when he doesn’t get his dinner. As someone else said to me “Dude, bring a granola bar.”

We ended at 9:00 and didn’t get through everything scheduled for last night. We will resume questions this evening at 4:30 in room 260 of the Municipal Building and you can see it on channel 12.

p.s. Over the weekend, I did six other posts you might want to check out. They involve