"Penny Wise and Pound Foolish"

That's what Ana Garcia, our Village Manager, told Commissioners at the final budget hearing tonight.  Ana must have struggled with this budget.  As far as I know, Ana is personally a conservative.  Not just conservative, but a conservative.  She likes low taxes, and she streamlines things to get there.  That's why she presented a 8.9 mill budget last year.

But 8.9 wasn't enough.  It left us with unfixed problems, and no reserve at all.  This year, Commissioners must have suggested she ask for more tax money, so she put together a 9.5 mill budget.  It has more room in it to meet Village needs, but it still leaves some needs unfunded, and it adds only a little to the reserve.

The discussion two weeks ago was whether to accept the 9.5 mill budget, or raise taxes only to 9.4 mills.  This distinction had no actual meaning, but the tentative compromise proposal was just that.  And to get us to 9.4 from a budget based on 9.5 would have required some further cuts in expenses in the budget.  This was the sticking point where things were left off two weeks ago.  The Manager and the Finance Director were to scrutinize the budget more closely, to see if they could find $12,500 worth of cuts, which is what a 0.1 mill reduction in ad valorem tax revenue costs the Village.  Off the cuff, Commissioners and management could find about $8,000 two weeks ago, so someone had to come up with about $4,500 more.

They came close.  The Manager and the Finance Director managed to find a total of $12,448 or $12,444, depending on who was doing the talking.  On the one hand, you could say they were there.  What's $52 or $56?  On the other hand, you could say that with two weeks and lots of motivation, they just couldn't quite get there.  That's how little fat there is in this budget.

And with this budget, either 9.4 or 9.5, there is still no fund to repair the log cabin, nothing extra for median improvement, and nothing for erection of a fence along the railroad track.  Ana even mentioned "extreme needs."  In fact, there really wasn't much more to add to the reserve.  It was just a slight filling out of Village services, and the addition of an Administrative Assistant to the Manager, to do code compliance, grant-writing, and other administrative things the Manager and the Village Clerk couldn't do.  So still a pretty tight budget.

The Manager was rambling a bit when she said what she did about pennies and pounds, but I suspect this is what she meant.  She barely made it to a 9.4 mill budget, but not quite, and it would be penny wise and pound foolish to try to get there.  Or even to have gotten where she got.  It was a game no responsible steward, either professional manager or elected official, should play.

But she put it all out there, and let the Commission decide what it wanted to do.  And they did it!  They reinstated the 9.5 mill tax, and they accepted the budget.  There were two votes.  The 9.5 millage rate was passed by a majority which did not include Jacobs or Cooper, and the acceptance of the budget was passed by a supermajority, lacking only Cooper, who seems devoted to discord and disapproval, and has never agreed to any budget, even the one he now claims to endorse!  The consensus we got was very nice to see.

We're a long way from the lap of luxury, but the Commission has modeled a properish approach to the Village budget, and it has paved the way for possibly more generous funding of Village coffers next time.

Good for them.