Tag Archives: city budget

2010 city budget cuts of 15%-20% projected

Posted on by
1

Mayor Tom Barrett will propose budget cuts of 15% to 20%  in order to deal with debt service, levy limits and employee benefit costs, according to City Budget Director Mark Nicolini.

“All of you are aware that the city has been dealing with an ongoing imbalance between the costs of continuing service levels from year-to-year and the revenue growth available to fund those costs,” Nicolini wrote in a letter outlining preliminary budget instructions. “I am sorry to inform you that the imbalance has now reached a point where ‘managed decline’ is no longer a viable budget option.”

Barrett already is warning that the city may lose as many as 1,400 jobs over the next two years.

Nicolini said there are many financial stress factors that “include the cumulative impacts of changes in state shared revenue policy and the impact of the economy on the property tax base and other non-property tax local revenues.”

Health care and retirement cost trends, which have been favorable in recent years, “have taken a decided turn for the worse,” Nicolini wrote. “Final projections about these costs will not be available until late summer, but it is clear that the only sustainable means of addressing these cost increases is a substantial reduction to the number of city employees.”

Nicolini’s letter was provided to Milwaukee Rising by Ald. Michael Murphy, chairman of the Common Council’s Finance and Personnel Committee.

For 2010, department heads should propose budgets that will only continue — and not improve — 2009 service levels and should not expect to see even those budget requests granted, he said.

“This approach to budget requests is not a blank check to request increased funding, nor should any department expect that the proposed budget will include the amount needed to continue services at their current level,” Nicolini wrote. “The city faces significant fiscal challenges. The Proposed Executive Budget will include budget reductions of between 15%-20% relative to the baseline in order to pay for non-discretionary fringe benefit cost increases and debt service within levy limits and available non-property tax revenues.”

Summerfest to pay for police services?

Posted on by
1

Ald. Michael J. Murphy says he is he may try to get Summerfest to start paying for the police and fire services that have always been provided to the festival for free.

“They do have several million dollars in their reserve account and we’re in a very difficult situation where we’re literally paying overtime for  officers in district stations to staff theis type of large event,” he said during a meeting of the Common Council’s Finance and Personnel Committee. “If we charge the Milwaukee Brewers and we charge the Milwaukee Bucks and these other large organizations, one has to ask himself, why do we not charge them?”

The Milwaukee Brewers pay the city more than $1 million a year to for police services, he said. The Milwaukee Bucks also pay for police, as do other organizations. Milwaukee World Festival Inc., which operates Summerfest, does not pay, he said.

“We do receive a payment for the rent of the the land to World Festival — over a million dollars….That never had taken into consideration the costs of both police and fire services,” he said.

Police Chief Edward Flynn said the true costs of policing special events previously had been hidden because of the way the Police Department tracked them. Regular-duty personnel were assigned to the events, then officers on overtime were assigned to cover some of the regular-duty assignments in various police districts.

“THe Police Department overtime was jacking up in the districts,” he said. ”In the meantime, you didn’t see that the real cost wasn’t the police districts, it was the special events.”

Flynn said he revised the way special event assignments were tracked to better monitor the costs. So far this year, he said, the price tag was $575,000.

“This is how much the city spends to police these special events,” he said. ”Whether you decide we want to recover those costs some day is ultimately your call. You should know, as we look at Police Department expenditures, that a large percentage of those expenditures go to special events at which other people make a profit.”