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| February 2010 »
I admit I was a bit embarrassed when a friend confronted me that I had not updated “Coffee Time” recently. In fact, I haven’t really updated it at all. My time for writing or even enjoying coffee has been limited with other things in life but with the day after Thanksgiving off from work here I am at the Brew Ha writing a quick update on county government.
I am mostly proud to announce that after four months of deliberations, we passed a county budget that cut spending without raising our taxes. It wasn’t easy. We started back in August by taking an initial comb through the proposed 2010 county general budget to identify the obvious areas to cut. We cut nearly $3 million from the initial proposed budget to arrive at the final product we passed last month.
The first victim was the proposed annual pay raises for county employees. Next we invited department heads to propose cuts of their own. We asked each to propose 10 percent cuts to their budgets. Some department heads were better at this than others. I gained an appreciation for those who in the name of fiscal responsibility cooperated with this request at the same time as wondering if they’d be better off if they ignored us.
As members of the council we scrutinize department budgets line by line through each of their budget line items. I have wondered throughout this process why we simply can’t appropriate a certain amount of money to a department and require department heads to make the cuts themselves. Instead, we ask department heads to propose cuts of their own. Some take it seriously, others don’t. We essentially penalize the departments who cut their proposed budgets while other departments continue at current levels of spending despite our requests. I’d rather take a different approach and appropriate certain amounts of money to each department and allow department heads to use their best judgment of where they cut without having the option of ignoring our requests. Allen County has successfully adopted a similar model. When they have to cut spending, department heads are given an amount they will have to spend in their budget and they make it work.
The reason this matters most is that the 2011 budget must be even leaner than our budget for 2010 with the full impact of the State Legislature’s 1-2-3 property tax caps limiting tax revenue for local governments.
You should be proud to know that most of our department heads seriously considered the fiscal state of the county and admitted where they found waste in their budgets. Some proposed cuts to programs, others proposed eliminating unnecessary employee positions. These were not easy decisions.
While this entire situation is one that local government is suffering through, as a taxpayer I am thankful to see government growth limited and even shrinking a bit.
Stay tuned for more “Coffee Time” updates as we approach the end of the year. I hope to work on an update soon that includes some of the accomplishments I’ve seen on the county council since I took office last January.
Happy Holidays!