Thomas MacMillan Photo
Holmes weighs budget-cutting options Thursday night.
Don’t hire a “tweeter” for the police department. Keep a closer eye on overtime. Leave two bridge tender positions vacant.
City lawmakers Tuesday night began looking into those and other possibilities for budget savings for the next fiscal year.
The consideration occurred at a meeting of the Board of Aldermen’s Finance Committee, which is steaming toward the end of its review of the mayor’s proposed $503 million city operating budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.
The budget includes a property tax increase, which aldermen are working to avoid.
Which means they have to find additional budget cuts, new revenues, or both.
Board President Jorge Perez of the Hill came to Tuesday’s meeting with several ideas about where aldermen could look for savings to lower the mill rate. He stressed that he was not advocating for or against any of the measure he brought up, only presenting them to see if the committee wants to look into them further.
The committee decided it does.
The committee decided to look for possible savings in several areas: Not filling positions that are currently vacant, not hiring people for new positions added in the proposed budget, reducing or eliminating the $3 million increase requested by the Board of Ed, and doing the same to a $1.4 million increase requested by the police department.
Aldermen did not make any concrete proposals about any of these areas; they simply flagged them as places to start looking for savings.
All resultant budget amendment proposals are due to be submitted by 10 a.m. on Monday. Next Thursday, the Finance Committee will hold a final meeting to consider amendments and vote the budget on to the full Board of Aldermen.
Vacancies: $2M
Tuesday night’s meeting started off with good news from Budget Director Joe Clerkin (pictured). He reported that $5.2 million in projected cuts to state funding will not happen. That means the property tax increase in the mayor’s budget is 3.5 mills instead of 4.5.
Clerkin passed out a list of currently vacant staff positions compiled at the request of Alderman Perez. The city currently has 36 vacant positions in several city departments, totaling just under $2 million. The list includes a city controller, assessor, labor relations director, supervising librarian, two parks department caretakers and a tree trimmer, a river keeper, deputy public works director, refuse laborer, two bridge tenders, and a building inspector, among other jobs.
Not on the list are the many vacancies among sworn employees of the fire and police departments: cops and firefighters. Perez said the fire department has about 80 vacancies. If, for example, 46 come out of the academy in August, the city could take one month of attrition cuts to their salaries in July, Perez said. If the other 34 aren’t filled until, say, nine months later, the city could make attrition cuts there as well, Perez said, using hypothetical numbers.
East Rock Alderwoman Jessica Holmes said the committee should look for attrition savings and get a clear picture from department heads about what staffing is absolutely vital.
OT Scrutiny
Perez also suggested the Finance Committee may want to keep police and fire overtime spending on a short leash.
“We may want to have all the chiefs here every month,” he said.
“What kind of real controls do we have?” asked Hill Alderwoman Andrea Jackson-Brooks, chair of the Finance Committee. “If you need a cop, you need a cop.”
“Just putting a light on it works,” said Perez. It’s worked in the past, he said. Scrutiny from aldermen helped reduce police overtime by a third in the past, he said. “It’s going to take the whole committee taking a more active role.”
New Positions: $445K
The committee next considered the new positions in the mayor’s proposed budget: a chief operating officer for the Finance Department, five school crossing guards, an administrative assistant and four neighborhood specialists for the Livable City Initiative (LCI). The LCI positions had been paid for out of special funds; the budget calls for shifting them to general fund employees.
Also on the list is a new non-sworn public information officer, or “tweeter” as Perez (pictured) said, quoting Independent commenter Cedar Hill Resident’s name for the new social media coordinator the chief proposed for the police department.
All together the new positions amount to $445,073.
After some discussion, aldermen agreed to look into eliminating all the new positions except the crossing guards. Aldermen Doug Hausladen and Justin Elicker sought more information about the necessity of the crossing guard positions.
Alderwoman Holmes asked about the new chief operating officer position, and whether it is being created as a spot for Mike O’Neill, the current acting comptroller. O’Neill is not eligible to serve as permanent controller since he lives out of town.
Clerkin said after the meeting that the chief operating officer position is not proposed as a job for any specific person, but because it’s necessary for the Finance Department.
Cops: $500K In Overtime
Clerkin also passed out a breakdown of the $1.4 million increase to the police department budget, a breakdown prepared at Perez’s request. The list includes $500,000 in overtime, $400,000 in salary, $50,000 for a new “tweeter,” $225,000 for gasoline, 100,000 for weapons and ammunition, $25,000 for utilities, and $50,000 for upgrading the Wintergreen armory.
“The only leeway we really have here is overtime, and maybe gas,” Perez said.
If overtime is cut, that may mean fewer cops walking in neighborhoods, warned East Rock Alderman Elicker (pictured).
Not necessarily, said Perez. Only about a third of police overtime is in patrol cops, he said.
The meeting closed with an admonition from Chairwoman Jackson-Brooks for aldermen to have their budget amendment proposals in by Monday at 10 a.m.