The City Manager Requests Another $9,000,000 in Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 on Top of the $8,000,000 Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Budget Increase Taxpayers Saw Last Year.
We review the Portsmouth FY2024 Budget in Four Parts.
By Buck Fuller
Part IV
This is the last of our four-part series on the FY 2024 Budget as currently proposed by the City Manager. This covers the several areas of the Budget that demonstrate poor management discipline in managing expense growth for the City.
Give-Aways
Yes, the City has a spending problem. But it also has a give-away problem. And it has a “can’t say no” problem.
Here’s a give-away problem. The City Council wants to fund outdoor dining, to the expense of parking revenue, that in no way compensates the City for lost revenue from outdoor dining parking spaces.
The City manager calculated and recommended charging $5,700 per space last year, and $3,000 this year since the length of the outdoor dining season was curtailed. Then the City Council got involved.
After a very confusing night of deliberation, the Council voted for fees for outdoor dining to stay the same as the old rates, then pull a new rule out of their hat that favors one of their local haunts, with an under-1,000 car traffic limit to close a whole street, that only affected ONE pub owner!
It was obvious to any casual observer that the Council has a couple of members who benefit from the outdoor dining provisions, giving up parking spaces for tables and seats.
Or as stated by the Parking Director on Page 450, “Operational changes include supporting the re-purposing of an estimated 8% of the City’s downtown Parking inventory to facilitate contact-less restaurant patronage and provide outdoor event venues, and the anticipated 300-space capacity reduction at the Hanover Garage facility during its 3-yr. renovation”.
“We need new revenue sources!” says Councilor Bagley. No, you need to stop accepting free meals from your restaurant friends and charge them the cost to the City of giving up these parking spaces for outdoor dining.
Or How about Prescott Park?
Last we checked, former City Manager, John Bohenko, and current City Councilor, John Tabor, sit on the Prescott Park Board. They’ve managed to shift the Park’s expenses for utilities on to the City taxpayers. Clever move since nobody read these contracts.
On May 15th, a former Councilor did read the contract and asked that night at the City Council meeting why the taxpayers are picking up the utilities for Prescott Park Arts Festival (PPAF)?And, why, as is shown on Page 467, has the PPAF 5-year contract fee remained at $23,000 when the FY2024 budget lists the noted Utilities at $33,000??
While we are on Prescott Park, why is there an apparently new charge on Page 471 for collective bargaining now appearing on the Park’s FY2023 budget? Is this a change in accounting for the City? Or are such charges simply entered across the board for every cost center in the City?
Maybe Climate Change Doesn’t Exist?
What happened to climate change? Of course, the City now has a climate czar because the City must prove it is green. But the snow removal budget shows no benefit from the warmingtemperatures the City is supposed to experience. Actual expenses for snow removal and snow “load outs” to truck snow out of downtown were down in FY2023, to just occurring once.
But the City wants to buy a brine truck and plow dump truck to improve snow removal for next year. Snow removal expenses for FY2024 are projected to be $650,000. See Page 317 for this. Here, the Parking Department expects to spend $300,000 forsnow removal. Public Works expects to spend $298,000, and, on Page 478, The Community Campus expects to spend$50,000. Seems like that is more than what’s needed given how warm our winters are projected to be.
What’s Not on the City’s Shopping List?
It is interesting to note that the funding levels for Police and the Fire Department are showing little increase. How could that be given everything else that’s going on in City Hall? Simple. The contracts for the police and firemen are up for renewal on June 30, after the budget gets approved. Missing from the FY2024 budget are the Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs) for these public servants, currently estimated at a total of $653,000, as shown in the Summary on Page 4. The taxpayers are not being shown the true percent increase for these services. They will be charged as surely as the sun rises in the east.
We get to see what sinks to the bottom of the milk bottle in this budget. Here are a few conclusions.
- The City has a spending problem and it’s growing fast.
- Bloated salaries for the white-collar positions are justified in order “to attract good quality hires.” But in reality, the quality of staff, as seen in Finance and Legal to just cite two examples, is inadequate judging by the need for significant increases in training and education.
- The City Council doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. Just because its members were elected doesn’t mean they are knowledgeable or qualified.
- Being unable to identify how to manage the resources they have, neither City management nor the City Council can make the difficult economic decisions to effectively limit the scope and scale of the City’s endeavors in order to better control spending and preserve revenue.
- Longer-term priorities, such as better managed water resources and police and fire protection, may suffer as a result.
The result is a City whose budget and spending are out of control, where it seeks sources of revenue by tapping reserves. Taxpayer, beware.
