Budget Hearing Follow-up

  Friday, October 23rd 2009

I wanted to share the questions (and more importantly the answers) that came out of our public budget hearing.

Before I do that however, I wanted to clarify a few things about the "tentative budget", and the budget process as a whole.

The tentative budget, as the name implies, is tentative. It's really just one step in a multi-month process which began back in July in drafting the 2010 budget.

I started putting ideas down on paper and researching their costs back in July, and as other Commissioners did the same, the Board began to have meetings and publically brainstorming the 2010 project. I believe, the Board had at least two or three meetings where the budget (or various aspects of it) were discussed publically well before the "tentative" budget was even put together.

What I'm trying to explain is just how lengthy the budget process actually is. The Board of Fire Commissioners takes the responsibility of creating the budget very seriously - and we stride to keep taxes low, and to maximize the return on our taxpayers monies.

And the Board of Fire Commissioners goes above and beyond what is required by law to be as open and transparent as possible as a local government. I was unable to find any tentative budgets on any neighboring fire district's websites (which is a requirement by law), nor do I know of any other fire districts that have newsletters (a compliment the Board received in fact during the public hearing).

So the GFD does a lot towards open government, and to inform our residents of the Board's thoughts regarding the budget.

As I've commented previously, there were some unfortunate false conclusions drawn about the tentative budget. For example, I heard that people believed that taxes were going up 4%. Granted the wording in the newsletter could have been better, but it was not misleading in my opinion. No where in the newsletter did it say "increase of taxes" - just that the overall budget size grew 4% - but the two are definitely not the same thing.

The fact is, that the proposed tax rate was less than 1 cent (yes that's 1 penny) more than last year - so for all intensive purposes, I commonly refer to that as a 0% raise. So how can the tax rate be 0% different from last year, and the budget grow by 4%? Its because we had a lot of new properties come onto the tax roles. Ultimately that means that we have more money coming "into the pot" so to speak.

I'm not able to speak for the rest of the Board, but I know that none of the Board members ever stated (or believed for that matter) that we should raise taxes 4%. Unfortunately, that at the press time of the newsletters, more information regarding the budget was not available - so the information regarding the budget was relatively brief (which is probably why it was a little confusing).

Now with that said, let's move on to some of the questions raised during the meeting (in no particular order):

1. Why do we have a line-item for vaccinations?
2. Why did you double the building reserve account?
3. Why do you have a line-item for hose testing and pump testing? that was only $2000 last year, and now its $13,500
4. I'm not happy about the maintenance person
5. $16,000 for phones seems like a lot, can you get a handle on that?
6. I think the EMS account should be increased, that is the majority of your calls - why is it only $9,000?
7. Why did you increase equipment repair - you got rid of the old 293, repair costs should be going down

So let me give you the answers to all of these, and paraphrase what was discussed during the meeting:

1. vaccinations are a NFPA requirement, and these have been paid for by the fire district in the past, its just the first time its actually showed up as a line-item. Usually we "steal" money from other accounts, which is - generally speaking, a poor accounting practice. A better practice, obviously, is to have this money allocated from the start and earmarked for vaccinations
2. the building reserve was doubled because of the pending expectation of building maintenance as our facilities continue to age. We are seeing the beginnings of this with the Porter Corners fire station.
3. This is the first year that we *finally* started hose and pump testing - and we've discovered that a large portion of our hose inventory is no longer in working order. As a personal note, I am very proud of this addition to the budget, our volunteers should be worried about training, responding to calls, and returning home safely to their families, not testing hose.
4. The maintenance person was added to address the rising, and frankly, out of control maintenance costs of the district fleet. That being said, we can look into the feasibility and benefits of the position for future inclusion in the budget
5. Phones are just one of those pieces of equipment that you wish you had during an emergency - when you really need it, you are glad its there, but no one can truly predict when that will be. That being said, we should look at the phones across the district, and investigate the possibility of removing some of the less used (i.e. less critical) ones.
6. While EMS is around 65% of our call volume, the EMS line item is strictly for operating expenses - big purchases for equipment generally come out of the EMS reserve account, or equipment reserve account. So the line item is fairly misleading, and it is believed, is sufficient for that purpose.
7. As previously stated, equipment repair is a serious concern and expense of the fire district. That's why it was discussed to add a maintenance person to address that very concern. Some other ideas have been discussed openly by the officers and Commissioners including changing repair companies to use more local companies, and optimizing of the district fleet.

One final comment, the Board unofficially agreed during the meeting to remove the "maintenance person" from the budget based on this (and other) feedback. I personally believe that someday we will need such a position, but the timing is off considering the economy.

This means that you will *most likely* see a decrease in the tax rate for next year - albeit, not a large one, but one none the less. I do not however know of the exact figures at this point.

If you have any questions, please just let me know.

posted by spackmann in Opinions at 11:24 PM (319 day(s) old)  Permalink