Mayor Mark Funkhouser put it on the line Wednesday, laying out some bold ideas to balance KC's budget.
Every one of them makes some sense.
-- Close the Municipal Correctional Institution, then pay to house the prisoners who are convicted of city crimes.
-- Phase out zoo funding (saving $4 million a year) over the next two years, and look for a private operator.
-- Have City Manager Wayne Cauthen get rid of 220 positions -- many of them in middle-management posts.
As Funkhouser pointed out in a 2002 audit, City Hall has far too many layers of supervision, too many layers of management.
But the mayor also had some good news.
If the city can save a lot of money by following his guidance, he wants to pour $10 million more into smoother streets.
So what happens now?
The City Council will be tugged by Cauthen to support his budget. After all, too many council members as well as the city manager haven't yet faced fiscal reality.
If Cauthen had been serious about repairing the city's financial woes, he would have done it in his proposed 2008-09 budget.
Cauthen failed. Now, with Funkhouser's ideas in hand, the council has just two weeks before it must pass a final budget.
Funkhouser has opened much-needed debates on a number of fronts. Not all of his ideas will be approved in the next 14 days. But it would be a shame if they were pushed to the side by a rookie-laden council that doesn't want to offend special interest groups.
Taxpayers better hope the City Council takes the situation seriously enough to approve a few of the mayor's bold ideas, then get ready to make some more painful moves in the coming year as the recession takes hold.
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Hard to get around the old representative democratic process KCL
Same budget process, different year. Like an auctioneer's gavel, only the Charter deadline for budget adoption ends the horse trading.
Horsetrading for votes
"You get my vote if you put $ in for this"
"I want to say we increased funding for X"
"I can't vote for a budget that does X becasue my supporters are against it"
Who will be the person on the council who gathers these requests? Hermann?
Coucil members will be quick to get their demand on the table because as soon as the magic number of 7, or with luck 9 is reached, the game will be over.
A few observations after skimming the 16 pg. .pdf in Prime Buzz
I'm still appreciative of the effort the Mayor invested in presenting specific budget recommendations. He's provided a useful budget policy tool over and beyond the usual staff recommendations.
Staff recommendations are always heavily influenced by prior year policy assumptions and staff rarely presumes to dictate bold new directions to the elected policy makers. That results in incremental rather than sweeping changes in staff prepared first drafts.
That said, the Mayor's suggested list of cuts and new spending ideas contains a few clinkers that may need some work or further explanation.
No. 1
Increasing the Workers Compensation Fund to an amount closer to claims paid experience levels is good fiscal management, but cutting $100,000.00 in employee safety training that could actually reduce the City's claim payout experience is counter productive. Safety training more than pays for itself in reduction of claims.
The Mayor clearly doesn't dislike training in general because he wants to increase employee development and training expenditures by $836,626.00 to meet a 2% of employee payroll cost industry benchmark.
Safety training should be a budget priority not low hanging fruit for budget cuts.
No. 2
The Mayor likes benchmarks and proposes adding $500,000.00 in new general fund dollars to the exclusively federal funding in the City's current housing program because most big cities do it.
Despite obvious local housing needs beyond any available fund commitment to fully address, I'm not sure that an "everybody's doing it" rationale justifies moving forward this year with a $0.00 to $500,000.00 increase in housing support when serious cuts are required throughout the budget.
No. 3
The Mayor's transmittal letter prioritizes Kids but there are mixed messages about how that works on the list of cuts and increases.
The Mayor would eliminate $100,000.00 for college admission test prep for City high school students because it "is far outside the mission of city government." It's a valuable and effective youth service but the Mayor's rationale for cutting it is pretty coherent.
What's confusing is his request for $200,000.00 in City general funds so the Mayor can lead an anticipated education summit for school districts with boundaries in whole or part within the City limits.
Wasn't the campaign promise to do this once tied to raising private funds? Is this summit expenditure any less outside the mission of City government?
No. 4
The Mayor proposes to double the annual City donation to the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City, a very worthy regionally focused nonprofit art sponsorship organization, by spending an additional $180,000.00 in City general funds. He also wants to add a one time(?) boost of $50,000 to the City's Art Commission. There is no mention of any change in the City's much discussed annual $2 million general fund contribution to the Jackson County Sports Authority for stadium maintenance.
He also wants to cut annual City subsidies in FY09 to the Friends of the Zoo by $2 million, the Liberty Memorial Association by $1 million, and wants the Starlight Theater Association, which operates without an annual City subsidy, to start paying $100,000.00 in annual rent.
The reasons he offers for discriminating between keeping and/or raising pay outs for some regional leisure attractions and funding cuts for Kansas City's own leisure assets are that pubic support for the Zoo and Liberty Memorial should be regional and/or that the nonprofit organizations managing the City owned facilities didn't competitively bid for the management rights and should be further privatized.
I could argue in more depth (but I won't now) the merits of the organizations involved, all of which I respect, or the differences in philosophy I apparently have with the Mayor over the relative the value of selecting nonprofit auxiliary organizations to run City amenities in trust vs. competatively bidding out the management of public venues to private promoters.
A part of me can't help but wonder if a little extra axe grinding went into these recommended budget chops, which are basicly recycled audit recommendations that received little deference at the time from previous Park Boards with oversight responsibility for the Zoo, Liberty Memorial, and Starlight Theatre.
Why not combine all 3 ideas into one solution?
Phase out the zoo funding, fire the 220 managers but allow them to form a private company that would then build and run a new private prison on the zoo grounds (perhaps near the Australia exhibit?) and, during after hours, allow model prisoners to care for the animals and keep the grounds maintained. It is a fact that rough natures respond to gentle nature, leading to a low cost rehabilitation in the manner of the Birdman of Alcatraz, and the cost savings on labor would finally make the zoo profitable. The managers would also make perfect zoo poop sanitary engineers, as well as IMAX ushers.
I say this is a 'win-win-win' for all involved. Thank you, Mr. Funkhouser!
too bad...
It is too bad that Funk couldn't be the City Manager and the Squid, Gloria Squitiro be the Mayor. Whereas the Funk's bidget reccommendations are not earth shattering in consequence and I am not even sure his plan gets us a balanced budget, the document he posted was professional, expansive and well thought out. A much better flyer than his wife's Christmas Card. The only big issue is that after the first year he has spent humiliating himself and losing any credibility of any kind and the good will of his council peers, can he get some or most of the plan through the council? Is he tough enough? Will he be the "Matador" or remain the "bull?" We will see
On an interesting side note, it seems that YTA continues to drift in the wind throughout this new blog where he was exiled to... without many bloggers trailing after him. I am a little surprised... oh well, like Eliot Spitzer, he brought this upon himself.
You've seen too many westerns, KC budget talks aren't OK Corral!
It's good to see the Mayor personally weighing in with his own long anticipated budget priorities but his recommendations don't represent a revolutionary repudiation of the budget planning process to this point and he's clearly not starting over from scratch.
Some final budget elements will be fundamental policy choices and many others will be incremental adjustments but the final budget will be a synthesis of staff recommendations and Council policy decisions, pretty much the way it reads in the textbooks.
It would be nice if the final document has as much Council buy in as possible and, thanks to immutable fiscal deadlines, we should all know soon.