City Council member Richard Clark chairs the Council’s Finance Committee this year. Elected in 2005, Clark represents District 3 and served as the Council president in 2009-10 after a year as vice president in 2008-09.
Clark led the Finance Committee to review newly elected Mayor Alvin Brown’s proposed City budget for 2011-12. Brown presented a $962.5 million budget, down $27.8 million, or 2.8 percent, from the current budget, that contained no new taxes or fees.
Brown also intends to propose a major reorganization of City government after the budget is approved and is working with consultants.
The committee completed its work on the budget, which is expected to be voted on by the full Council Sept. 27, the last meeting before the fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
The Council, led by President Stephen Joost, meets Tuesday and expects to hear from organizations that want their budget reductions restored or reconsidered.
Daily Record reporters met with Clark Thursday in his office at City Hall.
What did you think of Mayor Alvin Brown’s budget as presented to Council?
He did the best he could with what he was presented. I asked the former administration, what options did you give him with a budget to present? They said, we literally gave him a menu, and said, here are your options, and so he chose from those options.
Once we went into the budget, we realized there were some big issues, the biggest of which was obviously the actuarial study. That wound up bumping up to about $6.2 million. The sheriff had a $3.5 million grant, and we had prospective charitable giving.
The administration is telling us, ‘we’re going to do a reorganization, we’re going to slash the size of this government, we’re going to form these departments, these advisory boards.’
They don’t exist today, and had no description with them.
We said that’s great, but we can’t budget on prospective savings of a reorganization, because for all we know, you’re going to need more money.
They did the best with what they were given. It is unfair, to say the least, that the mayor has to present a budget 12 days after he’s officially mayor.
What do you think is going to happen with that final budget vote? Is it going to go easily?
I hope so. You know, we did very methodical work this year. It was never adversarial, which I really liked. No one ever got mean, and no one escaped unharmed. No one got through their budget and got out without a question. I think maybe the medical examiner got the easiest go. But they had a rough go a couple of years ago, if you’ll recall.
Someone’s going to want to put something back in.
We forced four or five projects this year where we told people, hey, we’re going to ‘paygo’ this year. If you want the project, pay for it.
I think half of those guys said, ‘uh, we don’t really need that.’
Discuss some of the toughest cuts and how much heat are you taking for them?
You know, we expect to hear from the people that are cut. We just do. The Jacksonville Journey met today and gave their pitch why they needed their money back. I was told that Stephen said, ‘we’ll try to help you.’ I don’t know.
The difficult ones to cut, regardless of where they are, are the ones where there are other Council members who clearly have a passion for it. John Crescimbeni has a passion for our library system. Warren Jones has a passion for the Journey, and for trying to solve those problems in Zone 1. It’s very difficult to make those decisions.
They make very passionate pleas, and we all get what they do, and how they serve Jacksonville. It is not ever, ever, ever going to be easy at the police level or the fire level to say, ‘we’re going to have to cut, so you’re going to have to find another way.’
The difficulty comes from how they react. Are they going to tell us ‘the City Council is damning us to crime-ridden streets, and fires on every corner,’ or are they going to say ‘hey, we’re going to have to find a way.’
Are the emotional pleas justified?
I don’t criticize how they do it. I’d do the same thing. That’s what you do. You’re trying to preserve your budget in any way, shape, form or fashion you can. If I’m them, I say, ‘let me find the 10 most egregious things to cut, and that’s what I’m going to tell you I’m going to do.’
We all know that is not what they’re going to do, and so I think what you’re seeing now is a maturation of the people that have been here, and a more conservative group that got elected realizes what they’re not going to do.
They’re going to tell you the sky is falling, but at the end of the day, we’re going to need to call their bluff. We’re going to need to see what they’re going to do.
This is a process.
What we’ve seen is that every year, people are getting leaner and leaner, but we haven’t seen a service drop.
What we’re saying now is you’re probably going to see a service level drop. This is where we’re at. That’s inevitable. Whether it’s this year or next year or the following, that’s where we’re headed.
And then you say to yourself, OK, at what point do we need to shift gears? What does that cost and how do we pay for it? That’s the next discussion to have. Here’s what it costs, and what do you want to do without?
What issues do you expect to come up before the final budget vote?
Libraries, I expect a tipping fee, I expect the Journey, I expect the sheriff, everything that you would expect. I don’t know that the library will get as much push now, simply because we’ve had the discussion for the second time in Finance. The sheriff is not going to go away quietly on his cut. I wouldn’t expect him to.
Nobody was cut so horrifically, with the exception of a few. We basically gave six months to the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission and said, figure it out. Figure it out.
How will City reorganization affect the budget?
We wrote into law, no reorg during a budget, because that’s the way they used to move the shells. It’s going to make the next year very difficult to track where we are, apples to apples. But we will know what we wound up with this year.
I don’t know what a major reorg is. The mantra is, ‘we’re going to seriously chop the size of this government.’ If they do that, and they do it successfully, then we should be in a much better position next year because we’ll know where our carryforward is.
That was my big goal for this year, how do we do some carryforward items? How do we start shrinking our spend rate? And that we have a longer-term projection, not a one-year budget cycle.
When we did the pension thing, everybody got hit across the board. We said, ‘how are you going to handle this?’ They said, ‘well, we’re going to have to let some people go.’
So, let’s do it. If you’re telling me you can let people go, let them go. I think that’s where we’re headed.
What I’ve learned in six years is we can’t just flip a switch. We are far more process-driven.
You know, you eat the elephant one bite at a time because there is no other way to do it.
Would you want to be Finance chair again?
Oh, absolutely. I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t. Continuity alone is a good thing.
What are you expecting over the next month?
My phone will ring a little more, as will everybody’s up here. We will find out who supports what.
This Tuesday is going to be our first tentative approval. There’ll be some wrangling, we’ll get a real good sense of what’s happening, we’ll see who wants to push what and who’s got whose ear.
When do you see the City being able to increase millage rates to improve revenue? Duval County has a pretty low millage rate.
We don’t, when you put in the fees and everything else. I had the auditors give me a number. It was about a year ago, I wanted to know the real number — put fees in, add the JEA in. When we added it all in, there are only three cities with a higher millage than us.
We’re not out of whack. We’re not this low-cost provider that everybody claims we are. We are in line with every other major city in the state of Florida.
So to your question, I don’t know. It’s up to them (the administration).
What do you think should happen with economic development? Has the JEDC come to an end? What would you like to see done in Jacksonville?
Personally, I think we have all the private sector people that we need.
What we need in-house is an accounting function. When we do a deal, we have to have compliance. So we need a couple of accountants, and they need to make sure that we comply. That’s it. That’s what we need. And we need a mayor and a Council who aren’t gun-shy about flying to wherever they need to go, be it taking a road trip to Brunswick or a long haul to Australia. I don’t care. If that’s where we need to go to job-prospect, that’s what you do.
Sometimes it takes four, five, 10 years to land whatever it is, and you’ve taken 50 trips to Korea, but that’s what it takes. Go do it. You have to farm it. That’s the way it works.
Most of the world is unlike ours, it’s very government-backed. It’s very political. And the idea that the mayor and somebody from the Council aren’t on that trip says something to those entities. It’s a commitment level.
If we’re going to do it, I think the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce should be our partner. Pick a number. ‘Here’s a half million dollars. (Chamber executive) Jerry (Mallot), go find two of the sharpest, most aggressive guys you can find, and go make it happen. The City’s backing you to make it happen.’
If we need to be a cheerleader, be a cheerleader, and go close the deal. That’s what I’d like to see. We need to leverage the resources we have. We do not need to build an economic machine. That’s what I believe.
One of the comments has always been that the City needs to make quicker approvals of economic development deals and that the JEDC and then Council actions took too long. Do you see that changing?
Then the JEDC was our process problem because our Council processes never changed. It isn’t our problem if the deal took too long, because we don’t see it until the very, very end. We are not the slow-up. If you told us we need to turn this in two weeks, because there are two other cities competing for the deal, we turned it in two weeks. We’ve never shied away from that. So if there’s a timing issue, it isn’t on us.
What are you sensing with the reorganization for City government? What are you hearing?
Nothing. I’ve no idea. They’re still hiring some staff that they want. I have no idea where they’re going. I don’t know what the marching orders for the consultants were, and to be perfectly frank, I don’t need to know. The mayor runs the government. We fund it. We’ll get our bite at the reorg when they’ve said, ‘here’s what we want to do.’
It’ll be very public at that point. We certainly don’t need to interfere with what he’s trying to do. He’s the mayor and we’re not. Let him reorg. Let him do it the way he wants to do it. He’s got to run the government.
Who will be in charge of approving the reorganization?
There’ll be some people that say, ‘no way, this isn’t going to work, it’s been tried.’ The good news is I’ve been here six years, Warren’s been here, John Crescimbeni’s been here, Denise Lee has been here. Denise has seen her fair share of reorgs, and she’s never been shy about giving you her opinion. So you know, we’ve got four people that have been here for quite a while. Bill Gulliford’s been mayor of another municipality, so we’ve got at least a very good understanding of what absolutely just isn’t going to work. But I really don’t think that’s what they’re going to do.
Are there any deal-breakers? Is there anything out there that the mayor could propose and you would be absolutely against?
Unequivocally, if he tries to grow it. That is not where we’re at. That’s the wrong direction. That’s not the purpose of a reorg, from what I’ve been told. It’s to be more efficient, not less.
But if he has priorities, and wants to spend more money doing X, Y and Z, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to say, ‘this is what’s right for Jacksonville.’ And if it’s public space, then OK. If it’s 10 more fire stations, whatever it is, that’s the beauty of this year for him. They’re going to be able to home in on what’s right for them, and what they truly believe in.
What about a Downtown Development Authority? Should that be a priority?
As I recall, John Delaney said, ‘we’re never going to give money south and east of the river. We’re not going to do it. We’re only going to go north and west of the river.’
Everybody still built on the Southside because that’s where they wanted to be. Then the market turned, and you couldn’t keep people out of the north and west side of the city.
The idea that you can artificially create a market Downtown is just not true. It doesn’t work that way.
You know what’s going to help Downtown? Two more Fidelitys.
Fidelity National Financial operates its headquarters near Downtown.
That’s what’s going to help Downtown. Let’s go find jobs and say, ‘we’re going to incentivize you, once you make the decisions to come to Jacksonville and to be Downtown. That’s where we want you. We don’t want to talk about other stuff. We want you to come here and we want you to come Downtown, and we want you to be a part of what we’re building here.’
Putting cobblestones Downtown is not going to change Downtown. We’ve got enormous vacancy rates. We need jobs Downtown, real jobs. People will want to work where they live. That’s the real deal.