Today's budget information

In this morning's briefing session, the city council received more information to consider as we move forward in the preparation of the 2006-07 city budget. Here are some of the items we reviewed.

First we received a summary of the citizen input into the process so far. Thirty-three residents responded through the February 21 public hearing, email, the city's Contact Center, and written comments. Fifteen requested no new tax increase with various recommendations for cuts - incentives, transfer station, golf tournament funding, and across the board cuts. Sixteen requested that services not be reduced in areas of GTA, libraries, police or certain other city programs.

Next came an explanation of the potential 4.25 cent tax increase we are facing just to cover existing services and programs. City Manager Mitchell Johnson stressed that staff is looking for all possible ways to lessen this amount. The breakdown includes two (2) cents for operation of the solid waste transfer station approved several years ago, one (1) cent for debt service on the 2000 bonds, and 1.25 cents to cover increased operations costs (fuel for city vehicles, heating costs for city buildings) and continued increases in employees' health insurance premiums.

Please take note that voters were told in 2000 at the time they approved the proposed bonds that the total impact on the tax rate would total three (3) cents when "the bills come due." I'm pleased to report that the tax rate increase has been limited to a total of 1.75 cents due to good fiscal management by our finance department. While no one likes the idea of a tax rate increase, the increase attributable to the repayment of the 2000 bonds is almost half of what voters were told to expect.

Mitch then shared a series of charts showing the ratio of city employees to the city's population that I will attempt to share here. "FTE" in these charts stands for "Full Time Equivalent" positions.

Chart A shows that the number of 2004-05 FTEs per 1000 residents (12.31) is actually below the level in 1997-98 (12.77). The city's workforce grew 12% with the greatest increases coming in police, parks and recreation, fire, and water resources while the city's population grew 16%. If the workforce had increased at the same rate as the population, the city would currently have an additional 109 positions.

Chart B depicts positions funded by the city's General Fund that are supported by your tax dollars. (The first chart includes Water Resources and other city Enterprise Funds that are paid for mainly by fees such as your water and sewer usage charges, etc.; those employees are not included in this second chart.) The General Fund supports the city's core services such as police, fire, and parks & recreation. The growth rate in this chart is essentially the same as the population growth with a slight decline from 8.95 positions to 8.89 despite the movement of Solid Waste employees from an enterprise fund into the General Fund when the council eliminated the solid waste fees and placed those costs onto the tax rate.

You can see city council's focus on hiring additional police officers in Chart C that gives us approximately 3.1 officers for every 1000 citizens.

Although the city continued to hire additional firefighters throughout this period, the ratio of positions to population actually fell from 1.85 to 1.78 as shown in Chart D. Much of the fire protection provided to recently annexed areas is currently being contracted with county volunteer fire departments which is quite costly to the city. That is the impetus for the manager's recommendation to construct additional city fire stations that you are likely see on a bond referendum in the fall.

Removing the additional positions in the police and fire departments, you can see in Chart E that the FTEs actually fall from 4.16 to 4.01. That occurred despite the city opening or taking on responsibility for 17+ additional facilities such as the new Central Library and the Hemphill and Edwards branch libraries, Police District Stations #1 and #3, the Kitchen Operations Center, Carolyn Allen Park, three fire stations, and the Sportsplex facility, among others.

So what does all this mean? Despite significant expansion of the city's population and the city services we must provide to those citizens, we have kept the city's workforce fairly "lean and mean." As a result, our ability to meet our obligations to our citizens is frequently being stretched thinner and thinner. A prime example of this is in Solid Waste - garbage collection. Our sanitation workers sometimes have difficulty in completing their routes in certain areas of the city during the normal work day, and there is no time left to go back and pick up the occasional missed can. Another example is the decreased police response times highlighted recently by WFMY News2.

With this information in hand, it's going to be difficult to implement those citizen suggestions about reducing city staff to reduce city costs unless citizens are willing to experience a cut in the services they use and depend on. We councilmembers have said for the last six months that we want to conduct a department-by-department review to identify and eliminate obsolete programs, and the city manager has supported that process. I suggested today that we quit TALKING about doing this and actually DO it. However, even if we began tomorrow, it's highly unlikely we could get it done in time to have much of an impact on this year's budget.

Nobody ever said this job was easy!