Edgewood Considers Budget, But Where’s The Music?
by John Weckerle
Tomorrow night, the Edgewood Town Council will review the proposed budget for FY 2010 to 2011. In some ways, it is hard to understand just exactly what they will be considering. The budget provided on the Town web site is convoluted and relatively uninformative and contains some obvious errors, which leads one to believe that there are probably less obvious errors, as well. The budget, as presented, contains numerous references to budget items that are not defined or explained. Throughout the spreadsheet provided the next fiscal year is identified as “-2012 011.” The document is provided in PDF format only; the original Excel spreadsheet is not provided, which makes it difficult to check the math or troubleshoot the equations used to calculate the figures presented.
We have been hearing word “on the street” of a projected 2% revenue decline. The budget as presented does not support such a decline; according to the “Budgeted Revenues” on the third page, municipal taxes and “general” are each slated to increase 4%, and municipal gas taxes are projected to rise by 2%. Declines in revenue from “SFC Fire Protection” and “Public Safety” are projected at 4% and 8%, respectively. The document incorrectly calculates the drop in “Parks and Recreation” revenues from $42,782 to $13,567 as a 215% decrease; the correct figure is 68%. The pie graph provided above the chart is “Consolidated Revenues” – for which fiscal year, it is anybody’s guess. Expenditure categories do not line up particularly well with revenue categories, making it difficult to reconcile what is going in with what is going out, and the spreadsheet is little help in that regard.
We haven’t taken the time go go through and do a line-by-line check on everything. For those who wish to do so, however, we took the PDF, converted it to a Word document, and then copied the content of the tables into an Excel spreadsheet. This does not give us the equations, but at least it puts the numbers into a format whereby various functions can be performed (the export is not perfect, so a little cleanup may be required). This may be of some use to those who may wish to propose an alternate budget.
One thing that is clearly missing from the budget is the much-talked-about funding for the annual Music Festival at Wildlife West Nature Park. While there were, to our knowledge, no specific promises made regarding that funding by candidates during the recent election, it was certainly an issue that was discussed and likely influenced some voters’ decisions. We should hope that, as the Council considers the budget tomorrow night, this issue will be considered and some motion made toward restoring part or all of the funding for the event, or finding another way to support it.
3 Responses “Edgewood Considers Budget, But Where’s The Music?”
I haven’t attended all of the meetings concerning budget but was at this last one. I also took a look at the document on the town web site. I think the decrease in projected revenue you have heard talked about relates to municipal GRT. Use the YTD actual to calculate an estimated monthly amount for the current FY and multiply by 12 to get a projected annual amount. You can then see a couple of things: 1) this revenue stream may very well end the current FY at 97.33% of projected. That would be a little more than a 2.5% reduction. 2) The proposed budget amount is about a 1.22% cut from where the current year is going. How this projection should be handled is still an open question. This week, Mr. Ring suggested we anticpate a 5% – 11% reduction in municipal GRT! I may have the particulars wrong but I think that’s the logic they are applying.
As for the Bluegrass Festival, it WAS discussed on 5/5 and the funds WLWNP has drawn down for promoting this event appear to still be there. I have heard virtually no discussion, either during the election or since, of a return to the legally questionable arrangement that existed before the town decided it was best to focus their funding on promotion and advertising.
Thanks for the detail on the financial figures. It would be best if the Town would do a better job in incorporating such figures in the publicly-available budget documents, which would make for a more informed public discussion.
As for the “legally questionable arrangement;” I consider the legal questionability to be rather questionable. Understand that I’ve reviewed all records, including e-mail communications, associated with this issue. This started out as an issue of policy expressed by the Mayor, who at the outset conceded that he believed the funding to be legal. The Town Attorney’s opinion was narrowly written, and it appears highly likely that he was specifically instructed to craft an opinion designed to provide a justification for terminating the funding; had he been instructed to include in his evaluation alternatives that might achieve the same result as the disputed arrangement, I believe that things might have turned out quite differently. At least one attorney has publicly disagreed with his opinion. No effort was made on the part of the Town to even investigate an alternative means of providing equivalent support to the event – providing further weight to the interpretation that this was an issue of policy, rather than legality, and that the debate over the legality of the Town’s support was simply a means to an end.
The issue was first raised in 2004, maybe earlier, both in Town Council and on the Recreation Commission where I served. The question in Council had to do with whether or not a contract for a Bluegrass Festival was possible. The answer was “as long as it’s done in a way that complies with state law.” It could be that no one probed the legal questions deeply enough at that time before moving forward.
The recreation commission grappled with trying to get a handle on the revenues and expenses for the event.
As you know, John, law has as much to do with precedent and interpretation as it does with statute. There doesn’t seem to be much of a precedent around the state for funding an event like this in the way the town initially went about it. There is yet no legal precedent for the funding mechanism that the town did settle on (funding promotion and advertising only). That mechanism is borrowed from the law governing lodgers’ tax and Edgewood doesn’t have one. I’m sure you also recognize that a municipality contracting with a non-profit is a very different matter than a contract bewteen two individuals.