WESTFIELD – The clock continues to tick, unrelentingly, toward the July 1 start of the city’s 2014 fiscal year, a budget that is currently in the red by nearly $400,000.
As time dwindles to meet that fiduciary deadline and balance the proposed 2014 budget, the City Council’s Finance Committee is coming up with more questions than the answers.
The answer it is seeking involves how to either cut spending or find new revenue or a combination of both. Cutting departmental budgets is difficult because of contractual obligations, and because of resident expectations of the level of services they receive from the city.
At-large Councilor John J. Beltrandi III, a member of the Finance Committee, summed it up following discussion with another six departments last night.
“We don’t have any money,” Beltrandi said. “We got a budget that was $387,000 in the red and than last week we were notified that the administration added another $5,900.”
Finance Chairman Richard E. Onofrey Jr., the Ward 5 councilor, said that the state budget cherry sheet, which includes unrestricted aid to cities and towns, may help bridge that gap as the city moves to adopting a balanced budget.
“Numbers we seem to be getting from the state, those numbers seem to be up,” Onofrey said, “If those numbers are up it will take care of some of the problem.”
Mayor Daniel M. Knapik, who has promised that the budget will be balanced before the City Council has to vote later this month, may have to initiate more budget cuts if state aid and local revenue streams are not sufficient.
The Finance Committee is slated to meet with School Department officials tonight to discuss the $55.5 million budget which is slightly less than half of the total municipal budget financed through the general fund from property and excise taxes and state aid.
The total budget, when adding the budgets of the city’s six enterprise accounts (ambulance, Community Preservation, stormwater, wastewater treatment, water and sewer), is proposed at $127,367,854.49.
