Indiana

Ballard?s Balanced Budget, Part II

By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz

For the second year in a row, the Ballard administration says it will present the taxpayers with a budget Monday night that is balanced, increases funding for public safety, takes advantage of available federal stimulus dollars and leaves the city with a $50 million surplus in 2012.

In a briefing with media this afternoon, City Controller Dave Reynolds says much of they did was accomplished by holding the line on spending and asking all city-county non-public safety agencies to cut their budgets by five-percent.  The city did the same thing last year.  Reynolds says they did not micromanage the different agencies, but if they could not meet the five-percent goal they were asked to justify why.

Some of the highlights include the following…

• The budget goes from $1.2 billion to $1.22 billion.
• The city started the budget cycle with a $40 million funding gap.  $30 million came from tax caps, $10 million from declining revenue.
• Public safety spending was increased overall from $397 million to $431 million.
• Criminal Justice spending (i.e. prosecutor, courts) went from $200 million to $209 million.
• City agency spending went from $363 million to $325 million.
• Executive branch spending went from $87 million to $89 million.
• There is a five percent raise for police and city union employees, however 25% of those raises will come from their respective agencies.
• The city will take in about $60 million in federal stimulus dollars which will be added to already existing projects.
• The city will use stimulus dollars to hire 50 new police officers and use a grant from the Criminal Justice Institute to equip them.
• Township residents in non-consolidated fire departments will no longer see their portion of the public safety tax go into IFD, instead it will just go into the other public safety departments.
• The city saved $2 million by eliminating the township assessors offices and will save another $300,000 next year once the former assessors are no longer paid a portion of their former salaries.
• There is a $9 million increase in property taxes to service debt on a bond floated by the Peterson administration to pay for police pensions, however because of tax caps, no residential home owner will ever pay more than one-percent of their home’s value.
• Reynolds says since coming into office, they’ve managed to cut about $65 million from the budget since taking office.

In addition, the Peterson adminstration predicted a $200 million budget deficit in 2012.  Under the Ballard plan, that deficit becomes a $50 million surplus.   Reynolds the city will have to keep a watchful eye on spending.   The full budget will be presented tomorrow night and the full council will vote on the budget on September 21.

And just so save everyone a lot of grief now, the Capital Improvement Board is not part of the City-County portion of the budget.  It is a separate entity like the Airport and Library.

Full post as published by Indiana Barrister on August 09, 2009 (boomark / email).