I attended the longest City Council committee meeting in my recent memory on Thursday night.
That evening, after meeting with many of the city’s departments individually, the City Council Finance Committee sat down to go through the budget line by line (by line by line by line… ) in order to offer potential cuts to the mayor’s Fiscal Year 2014 proposed budget.
Under state statute, the Council is only permitted to make cuts to the Mayor’s proposed budget, not increases. Here is the short version below:
Chapter 44 Section 32: Within one hundred and seventy days after the annual organization of the city government in any city other than Boston, the mayor shall submit to the city council the annual budget which shall be a statement of the amounts recommended by him for proposed expenditures of the city for the next fiscal year….The city council may by majority vote make appropriations for the purposes recommended and may reduce or reject any amount recommended in the annual budget.
The Council has 45 days to act on the budget up to a deadline of June 30, after which if the clock runs out or if the Council takes no action, the Mayor’s budget automatically becomes law. Traditionally however, the City Council’s Finance Committee has taken the budget under review and offered suggestions to the full Council on potential reductions.
Lately there hasn’t been a lot to suggest. Starting with former Finance Chair John Liptak back in 2008, the Finance Committee – responding to heavy local aid funding cuts installed by the governor and the legislature – took the proverbial scalpel to the budget, and the efforts of he and his colleagues on that committee and in the Council chambers stabilized the annual budgets at a time when we were searching for every dollar we could find to keep programs like community policing and bulk pick up going. Since then, Chairman Rick Onofrey and his team – Christopher Crean, David Flaherty, and John Beltrandi – have continued on that path, and with the ascension of former Councilor Daniel Knapik to the corner office, the annual budget process has become a relatively smooth, stable and predictable process.
Still, the budget bears the scars of the local aid torn away by the legislature. The city of Westfield is down almost $200,000 in local aid payments this year, and a whopping $3.6 million since the peak of almost $40 million in Fiscal Year 2009. Just for a little perspective, that $3.6 million would translate into a property tax bill approximately $240 lower per year than what the city currently levies on the average single-family taxpayer. When the budget spiraled out of balance on Beacon Hill in 2008, the state immediately went after local aid, using it as a back-door way to balance their budget on the backs of local property taxpayers. Even as lottery revenues – one of the primary dedicated sources of local aid funding – have remained robust, the legislature’s proclivity for skimming off the top of the Lottery’s revenue to fund their general fund obligations has left local aid significantly below peak levels, leaving local residents to make up the difference out of their property tax dollars. This year offered no relief for local residents, as the Commonwealth scrambles to find dollars to fund a projected 10 percent increase in annual state medical expenditures. Guess nothing is as expensive as free health care….
Last Thursday the Finance Committee addressed a projected $400,000 gap between projected revenue and budgeted expenses. While the projected revenues for the year are always fluid, and often change slightly between the adoption of the budget and the setting of the actual tax rate five months later, the final budget is a binding document on the city’s executive branch limiting how much each department can spend without seeking further Council approval. The state sets firm guidelines for how much revenue can be projected; for example, if Westfield collected $3.8 million in motor vehicle excise taxes last year, we can’t predict a higher number for this year without compelling evidence that the additional revenue will actually materialize. This is designed specifically to avoid situations like the town of Orange found themselves in for several years in a row, where the projected revenues were overly “optimistic”, resulting in the town running short of cash every June. Westfield has budgeted conservatively in conjunction with Department of Revenue requirements, and ended ever year with a small surplus left over (called “Free Cash”, which is the equivalent of the city’s checking account in case you see the term in the paper once in a while) that we use to spend on outstanding one-time needs like a new police cruiser, or that we sweep into our stabilization account, which is the equivalent of the city’s “savings account” to extend the previous analogy. From a low of $250,000 the financial team in both the legislative and executive branches of the city have built up the balance to several million dollars, which sounds like a lot until you realize the city’s budget runs about $117 million annually. Still it gives us an immediate cash cushion in case of an unforeseen disaster, which unfortunately recent history has shown us is more of a possibility than we’d like to think sometimes.
The cuts the Finance Committee proposed were not easy – the “easy” cuts were made years ago. But all of the members showed that they had done extensive homework not only into the individual budgetary line items, but even into the statutory laws and ordinances that controlled them. After extensive deliberation, the Committee has found the cuts necessary to bring the budget into balance and even a little more, which is a topic in and of itself likely to be a matter of intense debate over the next two weeks.
Christopher Keefe
Westfield City Council
Ward One
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not the staff, editor, or publisher of the Westfield News.
