Proposed Budget cuts for City of Fort Wayne

Posted by Mike Sylvester - 10/18/08 @ 1:58 pm - Filed Under City Council, Featured

I would like to start this post by thanking Jeff Pruitt for taking the time to attend these meetings. 

Next I would like to thank our current City Council for their views on the budget; I feel they have been responsible and I am impressed that they want the Mayor to cut 4.5 million from the current budget request.  I think 4.5 million dollars is appropriate and I am glad that our City Council has recommended this amount be cut from the budget.

I am disappointed in the Mayor’s office.  The budget they proposed is completely unacceptable.  It forces us to cut about 9% from the budget next year or to increase the county income tax significantly.  I am also disappointed that the Mayor’s office waited until October to submit a budget; the budget should have been submitted months ago.

Mostly I am disappointed in Mayor Tom Henry.  I talked to Mayor Henry at the Northwest Area Partnership Meeting on May 15th 2008 when he was looking for ideas on how to cut the budget.  At that meeting I told the Mayor that I felt that they would need input from people outside of the Mayor’s Administration in order to make significant budget cuts.  I furthermore volunteered to donate my time and expertise to help the Mayor and his Administration find ways to significantly cut their budget.  I gave the Mayor my business card.  I also gave one to Rachel Blakeman, a PIO that was present.  Realize that in my profession I have often helped companies cut their budgets and I am paid to perform this service.

I offered this service to the Mayor for free, he expressed friendly interest, and I have not heard back from the Mayor since…

I am meeting with the Mayor next Thursday night for Mayor’s night in.  I will ask him why he never called and did not take me up on my offer to donate my time to help his Administration make budget cuts.  I will also give him this list of proposed budget cuts.

There is no doubt in my mind that the City of Fort Wayne can cut its budget by 4.5% without a significant decrease in City services.   

My proposed budget cuts are below:

First reduce the proposed 1.5% salary increase to zero.  Businesses all over this country have realized that they need to freeze employee salaries because of current economic conditions.  The City of Fort Wayne is one of the largest employers in Fort Wayne and they need to behave like it.  Furthermore there have been many studies that have shown that the employees of the City of Fort Wayne are paid significantly higher salaries then Allen County employees.  There have also been numerous studies over the last couple of years that have showed that public sector jobs now on average pay significantly more then private sector jobs once you consider holidays, vacation, sick time, retirement benefits, health benefits, etc.   (Savings – 1.4 million)

Second alter take the home car policy per Chief Rusty York’s plan to have officers pay a fee for personal use of their patrol cars. York believes this will save about $250k. I think this is a prudent step and should be implemented immediately. (Savings $250k)

Third each Department that is supported by Property taxes should be required to cut the non personnel portion of its budget by 2% from the amount listed in the current proposed budget.  This would result in savings of:

  1.             Mayor, 2,932
  2.             Law, 2,562
  3.             Internal Audit, 164
  4.             HR, 3,282
  5.             Finance and Admin, 117,628
  6.             City Clerk/Council, 2,436
  7.             Metro, 1,338
  8.             Board of Public Works, 105,156
  9.             Community Development, 21,344
  10.             Police, 164,660
  11.             Animal Control, 10,310
  12.             Communications, 13,410
  13.             Fire, 56,616
  14.             Weights & Measures, 4,630
  15.             Parks, 87,102
  16.             Redevelopment, 628
  17.             Total Savings, $594,198      

Fourth has to be personnel cuts.  As mentioned previously every company that sees its future revenues decline cuts personnel.  It is an expected and prudent measure.  The City should be no different.  Once salary and benefits are included the average City Employee costs the City about $65,000 per year.  I would cut the following personnel

  1. Metro should cut 3 of the 12 they employ.  (There are currently three positions vacant and I think we should cut them.)
  2. Board of Works should cut 1 of the 47 they employ.
  3. Community Development should cut 2 of the 77 they employ.
  4. Police should cut 5 of the 495 they employ.
  5. Animal Control should cut 1 of the 37 they employ.
  6. Communications should cut 2 of the 95 they employ.
  7. Fire Department should cut 4 of 386 they employ.
  8. Parks should cut 3 of the 116 they employ.  (When the Parks Department sells 400 acres of the unused land it maintains it should be easy to cut employees)
  9. Mayor’s Office should cut 1 of the 19 they employ 

This would cut remove 22 employees (Savings 1.43 million).

Fifth I would direct the Parks Director to immediately facilitate the sale of unused properties in the City.  The City owns a large number of parcels of land that it has accumulated over the years and these properties are used for nothing.  Per Al Moll there are 400 acres of property that the City owns and maintains.  So I suggest the City immediately sell these unused parcels at a fire sale price.  These pieces should be offered immediately to any neighborhood associations the land is part of as well as to the neighboring property owners.  A fire sale price would be $2000 per acre.  This would result in a savings of $800,000.

Sixth are the maintenance savings that would be realized by selling these 400 acres.  Per Al Moll the average cost of maintaining City property is $4000 per acre.  Lets assume that these unused parcels cost half as much to maintain as those areas that are used.  Lets further assume that it takes half the year to sell the properties.  This would result in a savings of $400,000 this year.  (Note this proposal would save $800,000 per year starting next year!) 

There are certainly additional items that should be investigated; however, the above items would cut the budget by 4.874 million dollars.  This is $374,000 greater then the amount asked for by City Council

Some additional items that should be investigated for cost savings:  The High Performance Government Network and we should either remove parking fees downtown entirely or we should increase them.

Mike Sylvester

Comments

4 Responses to “Proposed Budget cuts for City of Fort Wayne”

  1. Jeff Pruitt on October 19th, 2008 12:11 pm

    Mike,

    Thanks for sharing your ideas - we have similar ideas in many areas. I think a combination of the two plans could definitely produce the necessary $4.5 million in cuts while minimizing impact to citizen services.

    I especially like the idea of selling off some of the land the parks department owns. I’m not sure I’d want to sell it all as there might be legitimate reasons for keeping parts of it but surely some of it can go…

  2. Mike Sylvester on October 20th, 2008 9:08 pm

    Jeff,

    I am sure we culd combine them fairly easily.

    I will definately talk to the Mayor about at it my “Mayors night in” appointment on Wednesday.

    Mike Sylvester

  3. Bobett Kelley on October 20th, 2008 10:48 pm

    Good Ideas. Especially, the Parks Rec.

    Mr. Harper may be an advocate to help stream-line the City budget.

  4. L. Marine on October 22nd, 2008 10:14 pm

    Mike-I like many of your budget cutting ideas but asking Metro to cut 25% of it’s staff is not realistic. These vacancies occurred over the past several months and the Commission and Director decided that our priority was to redouble efforts in order to meet our Federal contracts for cases closed before Oct 1 so we did not lose substantial federal revenue(which make up 30-35% of Metro expenditures). Interviewing,hiring and training of replacements would have taken way too much investigator and management time during the critical period of meeting our contracts. We are currently looking for new employees and will hire and train them one at a time as we continue to meet our contractual obligations. In addition,most if not all of the HUD money would be jeopardized if Metro(the City) does not do an acceptable level of Fair Housing efforts. This would include not just Metro but CD block grants and other items adding up to several million dollars per year.Be assured that if the employees are not needed-they won’t be hired and if budgeted funds are not required to be spent they will not be wasted but go back to the General fund. Metro Chair Marine

Leave a Reply