The Bottom Line: Looking for a painless solution in setting next year's budget

Yowser!

I participated in my first budget committee meeting last Wednesday evening and it was the equivalent of taking a cold shower. On a night where in year's past I would have normally been in church, sitting in the city council chambers and trying to follow the reports of all the department heads provoked me to silently pray nonetheless. At meeting's end, the first of several to follow, we were, by my count, $156,000 in the hole. For a guy who lives on a modest income and who pastors a small congregation with a lot leaner budget than even our town's size municipality it was...er...educational.

Every year at this time, the budget committee sits down to start crunching the numbers to formulate next year's budget. This committee – made up of the mayor, the city clerk, the deputy city clerk and two members of the council – is charged with submitting a balanced budget for approval by the city council by it's November meeting. Round 1 of this process is listening to the individual department heads – Community Center, Library, Public Works, and Police – present their needs and requests and get their proverbial two cents in. If you stacked all the paper that was passed around that night by rough count it amounted to fifty pages (which pales by comparison to Rice Lake's budget which I have on good authority to be 240 pages long!)

This doesn't represent Chetek but it's something like this

There are facility needs – the library needs a new roof within the next five years, Public Works needs a new-to-us dump truck, the Community Center needs a new furnace and air conditioner. The cost of the software that runs the computers in our squad cars has risen astronomically. And the snow plow season will soon be upon us and we have yet to fill our salt and sand bins. But the lion's share of the red ink that is currently on the 2017 budget can be attributed to the rise in health care costs. All of us who pay health care premiums can attest to the fact that if there is any sector of the economy that is not affected by the laws of gravity it's health care. In fact, do premiums ever come down?

For the past couple months City Clerk Carmen Newman has been hard at work trying to find the best possible policy for our city's employees. Despite all her best efforts to the contrary, it will cost us more next year than it did this year and deductibles will go up.

It's gotta happen

There are other expenses we will incur. Those aging light poles on the bridge have to come down much sooner than later. Though we applied for a grant to pay for half of our costs involved with relining the sewer pipes, we didn't make the cut. That problem – the processing of relatively clean ground water every day seeping into our sewer lines – is not going away. So we're going to have to secure a low interest loan to pay for it. It's too soon to tell if my personal pet project – the commencement of a sidewalk schedule to accompany our street schedule – will even make the grade given some of the other needs facing the city.

The day after I was elected mayor, I was stopped by my neighbor from across the street to congratulate me and plead with me to please don't raise his taxes. I was told point blank by someone at the Community Center just the other day that I better not raise her taxes. Here's the thing I'm learning: it's not that easy for a mayor, let alone a city council, to raise anybody's taxes on account of state levy restrictions. I suppose some of that is in place to prevent every small town in Wisconsin from installing a municipal pool and raise taxes to pay for it. But the total amount we are going to receive from the State would hardly fill a kiddie pool let alone a public one. $4,000. That's the sum total of our levy next year: $4,000 bucks. I can almost hear the guy from the state treasury's office deadpan it, “Don't spend it all in one place.” I guess that's why some communities – like Chippewa Falls, for example – experiment with things like a “wheel tax” (a measure that was upheld just last night in their council meeting by a 9-6 vote) as a way to generate more income. But even there the state restricts what you can do with those monies and may, in fact, take some away from you which offset any gains you might have made.

So, what happens next? Having heard from the department heads and received their projected budget, the budget committee will hunker down and start prioritizing, separating from what we would like and what we need. Anybody who's ever been involved in that process knows that's more art than science. What helps us is our outlay accounts – money that has been set aside to help pay for building improvements, purchasing of new equipment and so forth. That will certainly ease our pain as we go forward. And the sale of Knapp Haven (now Atrium Post Acute Care of Chetek). As much of a windfall as some might think it will be by the sale of that facility, a large segment of that amount has already been designated to “repay” us for the legal expenses incurred with that transaction (somewhere in the ballpark of $150,000!) All that to say don't expect new “old timey” street lights on Second Street anytime soon.

In an inter department memo sent prior to the first budget meeting, City Clerk Carmen Newman had this to say: “The loss in revenues and restriction on levies caused the City to decrease expenditures. One of the main cuts in services was the youth programs – lifeguards, summer recreation programs and the like. We really have not cut other services to the residents. We still provide garbage service, 24/7 police coverage, a public library and community center. Public works and the Police Department does a lot of community service at no cost to the user (such as Chamber of Commerce events like Liberty Fest, Brew Fest, Harvest Fest, etc.). They are putting up fencing, road barricades, parking signs, picking up garbage, patrolling, directing traffic, etc. Can we afford to do this?” It's a good question.

We can't have something for nothing. Streets (and sidewalks) have to be maintained. The community's safety and well-being need to be ensured. But something's gotta give. And Carmen tells me that the 2017 budget will be a relatively easy fix compared to the work we'll need to do for 2018. I can't wait.

Round 2 of the budget process will be next Wednesday night, September 21, at 5:30 p.m in the council chambers. This meeting, like all the budget meetings, are open to the public. I don't promise it will be entertaining. But if you're like me who really hasn't paid close attention over the years to the bottom line or has taken for granted the quality of services we continue to be able to supply to our constituents, it may be enlightening to say the least.