The Only Buck Passing Is Coming From Mayor Henry
Posted by Jeff Pruitt - 10/25/08 @ 10:43 am - Filed Under City Council, Featured
In one local paper there was a story related to a post I did yesterday regarding the upcoming budget vote on Tuesday. Council President Tom Didier confirmed that the council will be voting on a generic 3% budget cut.
The Fort Wayne City Council will vote Tuesday on whether to cut Mayor Tom Henry’s 2009 operating budget by 3 percent.
The overall cut is preferred, Didier said, because he is not a city department expert. By just cutting the bottom line, he said, the mayor can choose where to cut spending.
This is exactly how it should be done in my opinion but councilwoman Karen Goldner disagrees:
Councilwoman Karen Goldner, D-2nd, opposes the generic cut, saying if council members want to cut spending, they should have to identify where to take the money. She said it was “major buck passing” for the council to cut the budget, then blame the mayor for reducing services.
“I think it is very easy to say you want government to be smaller,” she said. “The appropriate thing for us to do is to come up with specific cuts.”
What am I missing here? The council is coming up with specific cuts but they would be provided as recommendations. That’s not passing the buck. The mayor’s complete disengagement from the issue and failure to provide one nickel of cuts is passing the buck.
Do some members of city council really think they have better insights into what the most efficient cuts would be - more so than the city professionals and department heads? Goldner’s council-cut-first philosophy works well when trimming the budget of a minor line-item here and there but it’s not the optimal solution when making million dollar cuts.
Just put yourself into the shoes of one of the department heads. Would you rather find the cuts within your own department or leave it up to a legislative body that may be influenced by politics more than policy?
As to the political point made by Goldner, the council would not be able to blame the mayor as she suggests - at least not successfully. For one, everybody understands that services need to be cut to trim 3% from the budget. Also, the mayor could simply implement many of the suggestions offered as recommendations by the city council.
I think the mayor’s disengagement shows that he’s truly the one wanting to gain political points from this issue. It’s incredible to suggest that part-time legislators should come up with every single cut and that the mayor, with a massive staff of full time professionals, can’t won’t come up with a single one himself.
The council should approve the generic budget cuts - it’s the only way to get the mayor involved in the process…
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11 Responses to “The Only Buck Passing Is Coming From Mayor Henry”
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Karen Goldner is probably right. A department head may know more about his department than anyone else, but it’s also his baby. Ask a good supervisor which people he can do without, and he’ll say that all of his people are indispensable. If he works with them all on a daily basis, if he develops an emotional attachment to all of them, then he can rationalize in his own mind that he needs all of them.
These budget cuts have to be made. If the department heads can dispassionately make recommendations about which parts of their own budgets can be cut, the Council can take that into consideration. But the Council will have to ultimately decide which services the city can best do without.
Robert, you are sole wrong…. Having as many of 55 people reporting to via five other managers I can attest first hand to you. It is pure bull!
I started to write out the reasons why but after getting to point 15 I believed would be way to long. Most managers are good people trying to do the best they can. Yes, there are a few does not but for you to say they are all bad by your comments is unfair and plain wrong.
In my joking ranting the other day that outside of one position I just cut head counts and not positions. The message within the joke was the Mayor could decide who stayed but he was going to be dealing with less people. It was to show the ugly part of how things could play out if the Mayor did not wish to take a leadership roll.
I support the idea of cutting the bottom line and let the Mayor figure out how to do it. City Council has no clue to the the nuts and bolts of most departments.
As for Ms. Goldner… Give me a break she is employed and her paycheck is signed by a man who rules with an iron fist. She is a puppet of his so her agenda is his agenda. So open your eyes to Don Willis and give me a break.
Again I support cutting just the bottom line and let the Mayor decide. He knows (with managers and supervisors) far better then City Council what can be done in tough times. He can be looking at 2010 with two plans. One is what he can do if the state does provide some relief and also what he will do if no relief comes.
J.Q.;
I think you need to re-read Robert’s comment. Generically speaking, all he really said is that people tend to get emotionally attached to those who they are close to and this attachment can sometimes obscure their objective assessment of those persons. If anyone disagrees with that simple statement, then I would suggest that they really don’t know much about the human psyche.
Now, here he simply substituted “managers” for “people” in this statement, because that made the message more pertinent to the subject at hand. Yet this seemed to agitate you greatly and you took persoanal offense at it. If he had used another specific term such as “truck-driver’s, reporters, or just about anything else, I really doubt if you would have been so enraged.
I would suggest that the reason you took this so offensively is simply do to the fact that you are a manager. And that in itself kind of supports Robert’s point that people are sometimes unable to let go of their personal attachment to a situation and judge it objectively.
Are they proposing to cut 3% from what they spent last year or from what they wanted to spend this year? In other words, is this the usual decrease of an increase, ie. no decrease at all?
Karen Goldner is right. If council can suggest minor cuts, they can suggest major cuts. They may not be very good at it, but that speaks more to their ability. It is still their responsibility to try.
“Iron fist,” JQ? Really? You can say whatever you’d like about me (and you do), but dragging Don into this is completely absurd, particularly when you make comments about him that are so far from the truth. Let’s just say that if I were to come up with a list of 100 phrases to define Don’s management style, “iron fist” would not be on it.
But returning to the issue at hand, I appreciate the discussion. My point is that it’s easy for Council to just say “make government smaller” but I truly believe that it is my job as a Councilperson to figure out how to make that happen, working with the other Councilmembers and the administration.
If I just wanted to say “MAKE GOVERNMENT SMALLER” I could become a pundit (or a blogger? just kidding) and share my opinion for all to hear. But I am paid by the citizens of Fort Wayne to do more than that. I’m paid by the citizens of Fort Wayne to help govern, and to me it’s not governing without worrying about the details.
I agree with Karen on this one.
The R’s want the Mayor to name the cuts so they can blame him for reduced services…and if you can’t see that, you have not been paying attention.
Do any of you REALLY think that the County Council would have recommended that the city cut its budget if Nelson Peters was Mayor?
They would not have.
THey are already running for the 2011 race- and if you pay attention you would see that.
Karen,
I agree that simply saying we should “MAKE GOVERNMENT SMALLER” w/o offering any suggestions would be irresponsible. But that does not appear to be what’s happening here.
As I understand it the council has cumulatively submitted more than the targeted number of cuts. How is that the equivalent to just saying “MAKE GOVERNMENT SMALLER”?
The recommendations are in - the details are there. In an ideal situation the mayor would’ve taken the 3% suggestion and came back with his own budget that the council could’ve fine tuned.
But the mayor punted so this looks to be the only way to get him fully involved in the process…
JQ,
Goldner is Willis’ puppet? C’mon JQ…
Evert,
The 3% cut would be from this year’s budget which was close to flat so for all intent and purposes it would be nearly a 3% cut from last year.
John Brown,
The council did suggest major cuts. The mayor hasn’t publicly suggested anything - major or minor…
Jeff, with all due respect I think there is a difference between one or two Councilmembers suggesting a particular cut, and the Council as a whole taking responsibility for making those cuts. It’s a matter of accountability.