2013 Llano City Budget Commentary

A few weeks ago, City Manager Finley DeGraffenried presented a deficit budget and Mayor Reagor and 3 of the Council members were quick to propose raising taxes, raising utility rates, and even borrowing money to resolve the deficit. Trimming the budget wasn't even mentioned. LlanoWatch'ers have submitted numerous suggestions for cutting waste and, led by Councilwoman Sherry Simpson, Council scheduled a Budget Workshop on 8/30/12 to balance the budget - hopefully.

As best as we can determine, the deficit is 1%, $92K. Any budget can be trimmed 1% without impacting mission critical items. Why won't Finley and Mayor Reagor just do it?

One obvious cut is Finley's undeserved 15% merit increase and the Community Developer's 27% raise after 6 months on the job.

LlanoWatch'ers have suggested a restructuring of the bureaucratic Community Developer staff position that would save $77,000 and provide better service to citizens.

Gee, two sentences and we balanced the budget.

One item we don't want to cut is the emergency generator for the Emergency Operations Center(EOC) at City Hall. How ironic that there is a $10K budget item for a fiber optic connection to City Hall for emergencies, but no emergency power to run the routers and computers. Emergency power is a mandatory requirement for an EOC. This is mission critical spending that we want.

Another cut we don't want without a serious discussion is a position in the water department.

Another suggestion LlanoWatch'ers had was to cleanup the padding in the budget. This isn't even cutting.

Budget padding. This is a sneaky way to hide money in a budget - overstate a proposed budget item and then use the money elsewhere during the year for stuff you don't want seen. In the very simple Lantex proposed budget below, the 2013 budget is 79% higher than the 2011 actual budget spent. Sure some things might go up and there is a new item for training. But 79% at Lantex? How about the $500 budgeted for office equipment. Didn't spend it in 2011 or this year. Where did it go? It probably went to Finley's 15% raise. For you see, the 2012 budget shows Finley at a 3% raise as does the 2013 budget. It took a Freedom of Information Act request to find the 15%. Even Council couldn't get that report when they asked.

So if the simple Lantex budget is plagued with budget padding, what about the bigger budget categories? Shouldn't Council demand a complete scrubbing of the budget?

More to come after the 9/30/12 Budget Workshop.