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 III
Part III covers two additional areas that show large increases in expenses: Legal and Community Campus.
Legal
The budget includes a new hire for Legal. Another attorney. Is this because Attorney Susan Morrell proved herself so inept as to ask to “phone a friend” in the middle of a City Council meeting when she was asked about Roberts Rules? And this is after every member of Legal received a promotion last year.
Look at the FY2022 total of $729,660 compared to the budget for this year, FY2023, of $986,421. In FY2024, the request is for another attorney to be hired and salaries will rise again, now to $1,047,669. That’s a jump of 44% over two years!
Community Campus
Expenses for Community Campus are a new entrant for the Citybudget. Look at how the City is allowing this to be a run-away cost center. The table below shows four columns of numbers: the FY2022 Budget, the FY 2022 Actual, the FY 2023 Budget and finally the proposed FY 2024 Budget. Remember that FY 2023 hasn’t closed yet.
Administration Costs Jump
The first block of numbers covers the Administration of Community Campus. Let’s stop here for a moment. For FY 2022, there was no budget, so those numbers are all zero. That makes sense. The FY2022 Actual numbers are what actually was spent for the period of time the City owned Community Campus, which is about 3 months of FY 2022. The total Administration costs are $7,573.
What to budget for FY 2023, which is where we are now? The City projected Administrative expenses to be $43,680. That is significantly above a simple extension of $7,573 times four quarters, or $30,292. In fact, it is 44% above. It looks as if the City knew it was budgeting too much, because for FY 2024 the budget was reduced to $38,282. That’s still 26% above what it should be.
Facilities Costs Jump as Well
The same comparison can be made under the Facilities section. Multiplying $138,372 times 4 equals $553,488. The Citybudgeted $638,097 for FY 2023, which is “only” 15% above what the straight extension would have been. The Cityapparently wants more padding for Facilities in FY 2024, so it is increasing this budget line to $688,454, an increase of $50,357.
This is a great example of how the City budgets: insert cushions and padding wherever possible.
This concludes the discussion on the areas of significant expense growth in the City’s proposed FY 2024 Budget. Part IV comes next and it will cover several examples of expense growth that demonstrate poor fiscal discipline.
