It’s mid-November, and on schedule, Whitewater (pop. 14,622) has a budget for 2012. There’s some good in this year’s result, but other challenges lie ahead.
(A pdf copy of the budget is available online. For my remarks on the 2011 budget, see Whitewater, Wisconsin’s Next Municipal Budget.)
A few remarks on the ‘12 budget:
With Council’s Guidance. As with last year’s budget, Common Council’s guidance to the city manager was to craft a municipal budget without an aggregate tax levy increase. That’s unquestionably the right course, and the single most important aspect of this budget is that it doesn’t further burden people in a struggling city.
The last-minute additional of a part-time Community Service Officer is both predictable and poor planning, but a leader’s taste for skirting rules applied to others only encourages second and third helpings.
Next year, if you choose, you’ll be able to set your watch to a similar last-minute request, so predictable are they.
In any event, keeping spending down only matters if residents feel an overall reduction in their net taxes.
Although the private National Bureau of Economic Research may have declared the Great Recession over, that’s hardly comforting for many in our city (or beyond).
There’s considerable risk that our economy may get worse before it gets better. A patient may recover quickly from a high fever, and bounce back after only few days. If, however, a lingering low-grade fever persists for weeks longer, that’s less than a mediocre recovery: it’s a sign of something worse, lying beneath the surface. These last few years of high unemployment and slow growth are that low-grade fever.
Without Council’s Guidance. The risk for Whitewater — as it was last year until Council intervened — is that her city manager likely wouldn’t have hit upon a no-increase budget without Council’s restraint. At every opportunity, one hears how very much city services are needed, how important city services are, and how much demand keeps rising. Given that view, there’s sure to be a proposal to expand yet again, through taxes upon residents, at the first opportunity. The gains from restraint may quickly be lost.
Had it not been for Council’s guidance this year, we’d probably already be back to business as usual (where business as usual is bad for business).
Now, about that persistent demand for more services: Which services, and for what purpose? It’s not that Whitewater doesn’t have enough money – it’s that this municipal administration has wasted money on grand but empty projects while simple and basic needs are neglected. This is not merely a matter of finding grant money or floating municipal debt, but (1) only taking grant money and municipal debt actually suited to our needs, and (2) recognizing that for every dollar of we spend, there will be huge costs in employee time and effort not enumerated on a project’s budget.
There are so many hours in a day; they shouldn’t be wasted on pyramid-building.
A Better Allocation. As with my remarks last year, we could reduce spending still more by cutting a few leadership positions, returning most of that to taxpayers in savings, and still have money left for food aid, for example, for our many poor.
Whitewater’s city administration should provide basic municipal services, not write grants, hatch unsuccessful development schemes, or commit time and effort to those projects. In this city of fewer than 15,000 people, the city’s manager doesn’t need an assistant, a panel of directors, etc. I’m sure those things make one feel grand, but they’re not needed. A municipal budget should be more than an exercise in bureaucratic ego-building and resume-crafting.
Anyone who wants a financier’s life should seek private employment, on Wall Street or elsewhere. (I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those jobs, so long as they’re without hidden public support or special deals.) Whitewater’s residents owe no one — no one at all — that thrill.
When Whitewater’s city manager declared that the city manager’s principal role should be development (as against provision of basic services), he wasn’t merely wrong, or even infuriatingly wrong, but absurdly, infuriatingly wrong.
See, transcription my own, from the Joint CDA & Common Council meeting on 7.11.11 beginning at 54:08:
BRUNNER: When it comes to economic development, I think, I don’t care, any, whoever is the city manager, it doesn’t have to be me, that’s that’s got to be their job number one. You’re trying to sell the city, we’re trying to develop the city, right? Whether it’s it’s it’s a full-time or it’s a part-time job, it’s it’s it’s something that I think the city manager’s going to be actively engaged in.
You know, in the last week and a half since we haven’t had a Neighborhood Services Director, things have not stopped. I’ve I’ve done three or four three retention visits in the last week, I’ve met with WHEDA [Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority] on potential being a potential lender for WHEDA, it’s just something we have to continue to do now. We can’t do that, you know, we can’t do that for five, or six, or ten months, we have to make some decisions on on how we’re going to do things with these positions, but, but in the interim we’re all going to pitch in we’re all going to do what it takes to get the job done.
Right? Wrong.
Here one sees the problem plainly: it is more than enough for the city manager to oversee basic services and their delivery equitably and efficiently. Development should never be his or her principal concern.
A city that allows the transformation of a good and simple public role into a mediocre and grandiose one fails her residents. Development is foremost a private matter, where government refrains from meddling.
(Listen earlier, beginning around 4:00, and you’ll hear what a hash has been made of tax incremental district 4, and how long it will take to pay it off. So much for skillful managerial development.)
The Hardest Lies Ahead. By the municipal administration’s own account, Whitewater’s fiscal future is uncertain. See, from only thirteen months ago, Whitewater’s Fiscal Trend Analysis. That analysis reveals serious problems with the City of Whitewater’s revenues per capita, and her net direct debt service.
Needless to say, America’s condition as not grown markedly better in that time.
There will be deeper cuts yet to come, and the longer one waits, the more painful they’ll be. There’s also a need for a different allocation, for vital services to the poor, although acknowledging that need will hurt the pride of one aged town squire or another.
So be it — better an injury to a man’s pride than a child’s health.
In any event, this Council will find, I think, that they’ll have to do yet more, over the next few years.