One day, $22 million.
City Council Finance Committee members have spent the past month in daylong sessions to review Mayor Alvin Brown’s proposed budget.
They’ve refused to borrow money or use reserves, which left them with close to a $60 million hole from which they’ve had to climb. Holding the line to last year’s expenses, capping employee numbers and other smaller cuts reduced it to about $30 million.
They’re now at about $22 million, with just today to fill the gap.
READ UPDATED STORY FROM THIS AFTERNOON HERE.
With such a large hole to fill, committee Chair Richard Clark suggested members putting on “really, really thick skin” for today. (Watch today's meeting here.)
The decisions before — including saying no to hiring additional police officers and assisting nonprofits — were difficult, he said.
Today would go beyond that.
“It’s going to get very, very hard,” he warned.
At the end of Thursday’s meeting, Finance member Lori Boyer raised a point that was a reminder of last year’s budget ordeal.
If the committee wanted to affect every general fund department equally, a cut of roughly 4 percent to 5 percent could be an option, according to the City Council Auditor’s Office.
Last year, departments were asked to submit budgets with a 4 percent cut to make ends meet. Faced with those cuts and $60 million in extraordinary lapses in Brown’s budget, the council raised property taxes to fill in the hole.
It likely won’t have that option this year, nor have members shown interest, as the millage rate has to be voted on during the first meeting in September — Tuesday.
Also during Tuesday’s meeting, the budget and capital improvement plan has to be established for the public.
That plan also is still in flux. This week, Boyer and others have attempted a clean-up of sorts to determine how much debt service payments are moving forward and what projects legally need to be funded next year.
She said Thursday that debt service is scheduled to rise “significantly” even if the council issues no new borrowing this year.
Auditors on Wednesday informed the committee that even with no new borrowing, debt obligations would increase to more than $105 million.
Boyer said they were still working on how much would the price would be after those required projects are included in the capital improvement plan.
Faced with such a dilemma, Boyer said she wasn’t in favor of going back on council’s stance of using reserves, but she wouldn’t take the option off the table. But doing so comes with future fiscal pain.
“If we decide to use reserves, we know for a fact we are looking at a $50-$60 million hole next year,” she said.
The Tuesday council deadline doesn’t preclude members from making amendments later.
The last regularly scheduled council meeting for the month is Sept. 23, with the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.
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