ORDER-2017-140 : City of Melrose Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2018 in the amount of $77,397,009.19 (Seventy-Seven Million, Three Hundred Ninety-Seven Thousand, Nine Dollars and Nineteen Cents)

Transcript (~15 min @ 31:40)

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▶ 31:35 Speaker 1: hearing the motion is seconded by alderman inferno on the motion all those in favor all right anyone opposed motion passes anybody who wishes to comment on the city budget for this particular year please come forward good evening julie de la circuit street

▶ 31:54 Speaker 9: um my comments are just um really i look at the numbers and and my comments are more just questions i have that i will put out there i know they probably you guys have looked at the budget and whether these questions can be answered but it's just some things that i've noticed One in particular was looking at and using the veterans maybe that line item because they just talked about the $400,000, yes, we'll get 75% back, but if you look at 2017 actual, it's only $290,000 or something like that, but we're budgeting $400,000. And so those are the sort of questions that I have is if actual in 2017 is only $290,000 and we're budgeting $400,000, what is that increase? Because, you know, we don't see that. So some of the other items, you know, I look at when I looked at the cemetery and, you know, markings are up 150%, landscape 58, cement and concrete up 80%. So those are the types of things that I look at and question, because I do budgets where I am, that those types of percentage increases really stand out and really, I think for the public to understand it, because you post that budget with these drastic increases with nothing much behind it. and so those you know I question that I think budgeting overtime for police and fire I get it that's going to be overtime but to budget the that at 18 and 16 percent increases is another question of what is it I get this year it was up a lot it was hot way higher than the what you budgeted but what's behind that to say that next year it's going to be as close to that it looks like it looks like they're trying to budget close to what 2017 actual was so I just I just because I look at it that way I know I have questions I know other people have had questions about what is it because there's no there's not a lot of detail behind to understand it and I'm not sure how much conversation gets into the the nitty-gritty of the the budget I just want that's that's for me that's what i want to put out there is that there probably should be a little more information on why uh why some of these numbers are so i mean parking salaries up 56 it's not a lot of money small amount but is that a second person is that increasing hours what is that that things like this are increasing by those dollar amounts so that's all i have to identify yourself please sir

▶ 35:07 Speaker 10: my name is Jordan Rose I came here a few weeks ago and I at the beginning of the

▶ 35:13 Speaker 10: budget process and I talked about what I feel is the inadequacy of the budget document that that's been presented to you by the city I took a look at over a

▶ 35:22 Speaker 10: number of years a little longitudinal study of every year what was projected

▶ 35:32 Speaker 10: by the mayor's office in this document to be the total amount projected for the

▶ 35:40 Speaker 7: present fiscal year in this case would be 2017 and then I looked at later what came up to be the actual 2017 and there's large discrepancies and what the the fallacy of this document here in terms of using it as a budgeting document is it's giving you at some level an arbitrary projection of what 2017 is going to be you know this document here today was printed on May

▶ 36:09 Speaker 7: 4th a month ago it had ten months of the fiscal year included in it there were only two months left but in those two months that were left there are huge additional projection that aren't at all linear with the with the original ten

▶ 36:24 Speaker 7: months but going back in historically and looking at what was projected by this document from which that projected line item is what the the proposed

▶ 36:34 Speaker 7: budget for next year is based on and you know it often shows you know point one percent change or two percent change or something like that but the fact is that change is often of an arbitrary number if you go back and you look at the real numbers of what was actually spent in that current fiscal year, and then compare it to the budget, the budget increases are huge, year after year after year. I mean, you have to ask yourself, how does so much money become available in free cash every year?

▶ 37:06 Speaker 7: Now, I'm not saying that you don't want to have a little bit of a buffer in certain line items to take care of unforeseen increases, in that there may be some things that come and lower than expenses and something's higher and you want to adjust between them but a budget such as this appears to structurally misstate what the intended expenses are for the current year they're not showing you a history and i want to be clear about this in the current document you have now the only actual number it shows you for a full year is the fy 16 number they don't show I'm going to show you FY15 and 14 so you can see about what it's been, so that you could then notice how far off this projected 2017 figure is. In the process with the Appropriations Committee, no one asked the question, well, how do you arrive at that projected budget for 2017?

▶ 38:04 Speaker 7: You know, it always seems feasible, well, if 2017 is this, well, that seems reasonable to go to 2018 for this amount, but the basis of that 2017 projected number is not stated, and in fact, going back and looking at it historically, it's blatantly wrong in a lot of cases.

▶ 38:26 Speaker 7: the work that I did to look at this budget was made infinitely more difficult because of the fact that this document isn't presented to the citizens or I believe to the Board of Aldermen here in a format that you could actually put into a spreadsheet and analyze right now the city certainly has a capacity to give you a document that's usable and workable and for those of you to have the expertise and, you know, working with spreadsheets and being able to take different columns and put them together, you should be able to have in front of you ten years of data and how it changed year by year, the actuals. You should be able to have a spreadsheet that shows for you where we are at the end of April or beginning of May of 2017 and by what rationale somebody came up with this projected 2017 number. Now, in other years, when I've raised this issue,

▶ 39:28 Speaker 7: in other years when I've raised this issue, the city auditor has said, well, pay no attention to the projected thing, it's not really relevant, it's just some artifact of munis that's not really real or anything else. But yet, even though that's what's said, the percentage change from one thing to show what you're budgeting for this year is based off of that number. I could go item by item, line by line in this budget, and show you where this applies. And where there, in my view, is egregious money grabs in this budget.

▶ 40:11 Speaker 7: You don't want me to do that, I'm sure.

▶ 40:19 Speaker 7: But I guess I wonder, does anybody really care we aren't actually looking at real numbers to make real, that's the word I'm looking

▶ 40:34 Speaker 7: for, thoughtful and deliberate and to some degree, as best we can, accurate representations of what we actually will spend this year and what we probably will spend next year.

▶ 40:52 Speaker 7: And, you know, the apparent answer to that is no, that nobody cares because year after year after year, we have the same situation where we have a document that really doesn't provide the real information that a person trying to evaluate a budget would really want

▶ 41:10 Speaker 7: to see and know. Maybe everybody's happy with that. Maybe everybody's happy with a whole lot of money that's extra in the budget every year that then can be allocated by some process next year to use some of that money for other things. disagree with that process is I think that the Board of Aldermen here should be at this point in the year for FY 18 planning out its strategy and its policy next year that it doesn't next year get done in kind of an ad hoc fashion oh well we have this much money over here what are you gonna do with it and too many years you know we often use money for snow removal and I understand and I think most people understand the basis for why you under budget snow removal

▶ 41:58 Speaker 7: class possibly but I've seen too many times in this room that a decision has been made to do something with free cash that people are all here hyping it up think it's a wonderful thing but it really hasn't been considered in the context of all the other expenses you make in the city and what policy you're expressing by that and and you know frankly and over the years a number of of items have been thrown to the school department to do some willy-nilly thing that really hasn't benefited the city it's wasted our money there's a number of other things that have done that way as well that I would love for this body to engage in the total amount of money we expect to have for next year and into actually prioritize a budget based on real numbers because as long as you leave everything so murky and gray you're not making a policy decision on on the priorities of your spending and what you want to use with the money you

▶ 43:05 Speaker 7: know you have a little more time for you consider this budget you know I would ask that you asked for the city auditor in the mayor's office to produce for you a document that shows what was the actual FY 14 what was the actual FY 15

▶ 43:26 Speaker 7: what was the actual FY16? Let's compare that to a document that shows what a real projected number for FY17 would be, and then let's look at the FY18 in the context of that. We don't need to see the 2017 original, revised, actual, and projection all in a document. We could have that in one separate document to provide a justification for how you get to the FY17 projected, but if you saw 14 15 16 an accurate and defensible FY 17 projection and then see the FY 18 next to that that would be useful to see and also what I the analysis that I ran through looking at what was presented as a projected of every year versus what turned out to be the actual and the discrepancies between that I think that would be useful for this board to see because if every year they project this and you budget in anticipation of that projection and the actual amount ends up being far less and that happens year after year after year at a line item that should indicate something to you that maybe they're doing the same thing this year and you know with all the work that you put into this budget you know week after week in this process of the two two months here I would think that you'd want to do something that's of more significance rather than just say oh yep that looks nice so that looks you know feasible because you're looking at numbers that at some level aren't real so you know please if in the time left I hope that you can do that and the other thing that never shows up really here in this process and I know it's not an inherent part of the budget per se but we don't see the income side of this right we see some revenue from some

▶ 45:21 Speaker 7: sources but it might be nice to see this budget and its total bottom line compared to what the expected totem bottom line would be with all the you know from the cherry sheet from other things that we have money coming in from as well as the fees that we have here if that was all shown in one place so we could see all of that together to see what we really have because frankly if

▶ 45:49 Speaker 7: If we're expecting to have a lot more revenue than this budget anticipates, that also puts ourselves in the position of the Board of Alderman not having the opportunity to express what your relative priorities are for things based on the amount of money you can legitimately expect to have coming in.

▶ 46:08 Speaker 7: So I'm talking about higher level process issues here.

▶ 46:13 Speaker 7: We could go in and talk about any line items in exquisite detail if you want.

▶ 46:18 Speaker 11: But there are, as you know, hundreds and hundreds of them here.

▶ 46:21 Speaker 7: But thank you very much for your time.

▶ 46:23 Speaker 1: Thank you, sir.

▶ 46:26 Speaker 1: Is there anybody else who wishes to speak this evening?

▶ 46:30 Peter D. Mortimer: Motion to close the public hearing, Mr. President.

▶ 46:33 Speaker 1: Second.

▶ 46:40 Speaker 1: The member is making a motion to close the public hearing. The motion is seconded by Alderman Forbes. All those in favor of the motion, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed?

▶ 46:56 Speaker 1: motion passes okay if we could please move on to communications from his honor