Here We Go Again

Budget cuts may be on the horizon, as the city announced yesterday that free cash was overestimated, and won't be able to fill its part of the revenue stream.

In short, the city predicted it would be able to fund about $600,000 of the budget with free cash, but now estimates it has only about $380,000 in free cash available. Hence, the possibility of cuts.

Mayor Dan Mylott says he was "surprised" by the lower figure, but the story doesn't say how the free cash figure was misfigured (by over one-third). While it's not the best municipal policy to fund the budget with free cash (especially when the margin is so small), it's not unheard of and isn't horrifically irresponsible.

Certainly, Mylott has to take responsibility for a lot of this, but today we're a little more interested in the City Council's role in all this.

You can dig through the archives to get all the details on the budget process, but let's summarize this way: The council hated Mylott's budget, and threatened to throw it back at him to do over. Heated rhetoric ensued. The council didn't throw the budget back, but sort of settled things with Mylott and approved the budget in the end.

You could say the council blinked and didn't push as hard as it should have (we came closest to this sentiment here). At the time, we kind of wondered why the council raged so hard and ended up doing so little (easiest answer, they were running out of time). Some members were saying the same thing yesterday.

"Perhaps we should've been stronger in our convictions, and demanded that things be done properly. Maybe we gave up too early," Norman Boisvert said in the Sentinel.

City Councilor at-large Thomas Conry told the paper, "I feel we, both the council and the taxpayers, have been duped."

We put a lot of last year's budget problems on Mylott, but he gets company this time. Politically, the budget process was shaping as a war between Mylott and the council, and in the end the council decided it didn't have the stomach for an all-out throwdown. In doing so, it stepped away from some of its policy goals. Now the budget has a hole in it.

And if you think that analysis is too harsh, go back and re-read Boisvert's and Conry's comments. Boisvert all but admits the council backed down. If the council had really hammered away at the budget, how could it have been "duped," as Conry says.

Not good times. Bad times. Amazingly, two months into the budget, here we go again.