2009 Budget Thoughts

  Friday, June 27th 2008

The budget process is always a long and critical one - on a personal note, I find it particularly challenging when I have to make a decision to cut funds to deny a particular worthy request - but that's the balancing act that I strongly believe the Commissioners must play - even when its unpopular.

I wanted to share some preliminary thoughts on what I would like to focus on for next year's budget.

1. Generator service contracts: the fire district is committed to installing generators in each firehouse - and they all come with a heavy (but worth it) price tag. We really should be focused on protecting these investiments by getting annual service contracts. Furthermore, as emergency generators - we should really be ensuring that they are maintained so that they do work when they are needed. We discussed this idea in yesterday's workshop, so I will know more about costs in the following week or so.
2. Maintenance Personnel: some Commissioners have suggested that we get a maintenance person(s) and have them available to fix the variety of maintenance issues that we have in the district. Certainly that as these buildings age and get used more frequently, they will require more maintenance to maintain them - that's not a far fetched concept to grasp. I don't however see this coming with a small price tag, so its something that we will have to balance
3. Access System Finalization: part of the access system initiative this year was to continue with installing interior doors at various locations throughout the fire district facilities and to enable the system for remote configuration (via internet). Next year should mark the last of the installs - hopefully completing the access system initiative. In addition, there have been some suggestions of hooking the system to our siren/pagers to have it automatically unlock doors when we get a call, etc. This has already been discussed with the security company, and its a very inexpensive option that I believe we should explore.
4. Equipment Reserve Savings: it's clear that the ladder situation is indeed an important one to the fire district, and a costly one to the taxpayers. We have already seen that had we purchased the trucks two years ago - we would have saved over $100,000, but that is water under the bridge. The Board is now looking at consultants to determine what our ladder truck requirements actually are, and so I'll speak more about that when their report is finalized. That being said, we know that the cost to purchase a new ladder is going to be substantial, so we should try and shift as much money as possible into the Equipment Reserve in preparation for this purchase.
5. Software Initiative: we are currently evaluating software to streamline ALL of the paperwork processes in the GFD, something that will save our personnel and firefighters countless hours. Depending on where this evaluation goes will determine additional costs, so in the next couple of months I'll know more about what will be required for this initiative - but this is a very important initiative (and one long time coming).

The trick now becomes how achieve the above goals (hopefully all) without raising taxes (and I have some ideas on that, but those require a lot more thought).

Some have argued that it is negligent if we don't raise taxes at least a 4% standard raise - because what happens is if we don't, we end up having to raise taxes a significant amount a few years later to make up for that difference. And as I have discussed in the past, this is precisely the predicament the GFD found it self in a few years ago when I first became a commissioner.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that argument, but I think we can do much more with the current budget before coming to the conclusion of raising taxes. That being said, we may have no choice but to raise taxes even after restructuring line items and moving funds around. But we'll see what happens after the Board works numbers out...

posted by spackmann in Opinions at 12:14 PM (804 day(s) old)  Permalink