Morsels from the Budget Hearings

The Mayor and City Council spent two days in hearings last month taking budget requests and justifications from department heads. Here are just a few morsels of insight gleaned from the hearings:

• LaVerkin, population 5,000, pays much more for its City attorney than American Fork, population 26,000.
• $1,000 at the library will buy 72 nonfiction, 132 fiction, OR 148 children's titles.
• The number of citations issued in American Fork increased from 3,922 (2005) to 6,945 (2006). Arrests have doubled from 425 (2005) to 837 (2006).
• The swamp cooler at the cemetery office leaks. It collapsed the ceiling twice last year.
• Blue stakes requests doubled this year. Two full-time employees, one in the water department and one with the broadband system, are needed to mark the five to fifteen requests that come in each day. The Council proposed cross-training one employee to make both markings, freeing up one full-timer for other work.
• Circulation at the library is up thirteen percent since the catalog went online last summer.
• The reason for delaying the railroad crossing at 560 West is NOT political will, as some have stated, but the want of $1 million.
• Cemetery employee Mark Kawahara has saved the City thousands of dollars by sharing his knack for small engine repair. This year's budget proposes a $6,000 line item to stock parts and allow Mark to work his magic on fleet maintenance.
• Chief Call, in St. George last month, was named Police Chief of the Year for intermediate-sized departments by the Utah Chiefs of Police Association -- after his first year on the job.

In all, budget requests came in at approximately $1.1 million above revenues. This does not include the $1 million needed to bridge the gap between our wages and fair market wages as identified in a recent wage study. So the shortfall is $2.1 million.

$2.1 million is only six percent of the City's $35 million budget. But it will be difficult to decide which six percent to shave. Very few requests could be called fluff. Most are items that have been sorely needed and sorely neglected for years.

On the other hand, our revenue stream, in my opinion, is the most we can justify asking of our taxpayers.

We can't fund everything this year. The situation calls for a master plan -- a road map that shows, over the course of time, which things must be phased into the City budget and in what order. Fortunately, Mayor Thompson has created the framework for such a plan. The Council's job, in connection with the budget process this spring, will be to plug in the priorities and the numbers.