The city of Dallas is in the red - what should be cut?
It is easy to see where the needs are in the city, but if you were the one in the hot-seat with the red pen, what would you cut from the unbalanced city budget? Or how could the city earn more cash?
In balancing the budget, which must be done according to the City Charter, you only have two choices: cut expenses or raise revenues. Much of the budget is also untouchable because it segregated by source. Money from federal funding, such as the FAA, can’t be used for anything other than city-owned airports (Love Field and Dallas Executive).
Always loathe to raise taxes and face the political heat, the City Council chooses to raise fees on things such as water/sewer bills, permits, parking meters — anything that can’t be called a tax. A misguided effort in the early ’90s implemented a steep fee on fire inspections, which were mandatory and the fees were repealed a year later after much outcry from building owners.
During that same period, we (I was on the council at the time) redirected $250,000 in police Auto Pound revenues to the arts budget.
In the end, budget shortfalls almost always come down to cuts. The easiest — although none are easy because every city service or program has a constituency — are first made on items like deferring maintenance on city facilities, the vehicle fleets, street repair and the like. These tend to be a false economy because we pay for it later by increased costs of catching up.
The other choices come to less or no street sweeping, cutting library and rec center hours and layoffs in non-public-safety departments.
Well-meaning citizens offer their own ideas, usually focusing on things like “cutting fraud, waste and abuse.” There’s bound to be some of that going on in any large organization, but you won’t find $100 million worth, and if it could be found easily enough to budget for it, those dollars would already have been discovered. Think or say what you like, but the city bureaucracy isn’t populated by cheats and slackers.
One secret of city budgeting is that general revenue bonds — like those used to pay for major construction projects like new libraries and fire stations, but not convention hotels — provide a source of revenue apart from their stated purposes. When bonds are sold, they are safely invested and generate substantial earnings. Those “earnings from bond proceeds” used to be the city manager’s secret slush fund used to respond to various demands of council members when they’d come up … until the council found them. Anyway, interest rates aren’t too hot now so proceeds might not be great.
Bottom line is there is no easy answer to the question. I’ve not looked into the mounds of budget documents to form a truly informed opinion, but Dallas will have to accept less of some of the stuff that we’ve grow accustomed to having.
A last, cautionary note: lots of us and lots of those representing us love to build things. That’s the only way you’ll ever get your name on a plaque to last through the ages, but when we construct a new recreation center, performance space or library, the hard part comes later in sustaining that place with staff and other operational costs. We’ve built a lot in the past 10 to 20 years and now have an operational budget that is twice what it was when I was on the council. It’s time to pay the piper.
27 May 2009 at 8:02 pm