Final part of a series on the Columbia city
budget
COLUMBIA, 9/20/10 (Beat Byte) -- The
Columbia City Council tonight
will vote to finalize a budget that became a maze of untenable
choices.
Presented with city manager Bill Watkins' plan to cut
firefighters in the chronically-underserved First Ward, Council members are
instead cutting the budgets of several volunteer citizen commissions, including
themselves.
The choices remind of the 2008 sewer bond issue -- and
myriad decisions before it that follow the same playbook. Then, the city
manager presented Council members with outlandish sewer rate hikes of roughly
450% over three years OR a $77 million bond. As we're now
learning, the bond will mean much higher rates -- just not as untenable as
450%.
Though the end result of the Council cutting its own
budget could be more power to the city manager, the move could equally
well build moral authority for Council members who come into their volunteer
elected positions intrinsically disadvantaged.
They get no pay, no staff, and no time relative to the
well-paid, well-staffed city administrators they supposedly govern. Council
members also get most of the blame when things go wrong, and little credit when
things go right.
First indicators are promising: If all goes according to
the agenda, the firefighters are back in business and the
police department gets an extra hand. Council members will
also reduce administrator travel and auto allowances, sharing the
pain with the paid mucky mucks. Good for them.
The other cuts, listed here, are a mixed bag:
more General Fund reductions; different Fire Department cuts; training budget cuts; a reduction in the Council printing budget
(hopefully offset by digital technology).
None of the numbers involve money
in the millions: Our Council members are still thousandaires when it comes to
having real say over city money.
But it's a start that follows the city manager's own
advice: the Council is trying to make the budget their own.
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