Our Fearless Budgeteers.

Tonight was the second/follow-up budget workshop.  It started with Ginny O'Halpin's proposal (it sounded impulsive and without foundation, as do most of Ginny's contributions) to raise the police chief's salary.  There was mention of a collection of previous salary increases given by David Hernandez.  Which was preceded by salary increases inexplicably given by Tracy Truppman.  Mac Kennedy calculated that the total of the recent and proposed raises for the chief would come to about 21%.

And this is on the basis of nothing, except a separate theory of expectable 5% raises for all Village employees.  The only other theory as to why the police chief should get an exceptional raise is that he's doing part of the manager's job, by taking charge of the Code compliance department.  (Yes, the immediately preceding interim manager also got an inordinately high salary.  This was presumably on the basis of his doing two jobs -- public works director and interim manager -- except it's not entirely clear he was doing either job, at least not well, and he jumped ship with zero notice.  Between recent former Commissioners and the recent interim manager, jumping ship with no notice is becoming a thing around here.)

We also did not change the rate at which we tax ourselves, sticking to a millage that is not rational, because it is not attached to an unchanging property value.  Nor is it connected to Village expenses.  Property values not uncommonly increase, but sometimes, they don't.  Sometimes, they decrease.  Costs more or less always increase.  It's like walking into a restaurant and proposing to spend on your meal 10% of however much money you have in your wallet, without knowing how much you have in your wallet, or how much the meals cost.

The underlying theory, of course, is that all of this has been taken into account by whoever put together the budget, which would normally be the manager.  But we haven't had competent management in BP since early in 2017.  So who knows who put this together.  From the presentation, it sounded like it was our finance director, Paul Winkeljohn.  He's the person we just rejected to be our interim manager.  We need him to be our manager, but we don't want him to be our manager.  Well, a majority of our Commission, or whoever does their thinking for them, doesn't want Paul to be our manager.  We did keep talking about the decisions our next fully credentialed and vetted manager would do, except "we've" worked hard not to have a fully credentialed and vetted manager.  So "we" (the Commission) are struggling to make the decisions a manager should be making, like whether or not we should have an assistant to the clerk, which we might need a lot less if we had a competent and efficient clerk.  But we got our clerk the same way we got our last permanent manager, which was from a mayor who didn't want anyone to be competent, because she wanted mindless underlings.

Another of Ginny's half-cocked and preconceived ideas was apparently her conclusion that we stop funding our lobbyist.  We've had this conversation before, and it seemed that everyone agreed to continue to hire Dave Caserta.  But apparently, someone told Ginny that we didn't really agree.  Ginny called upon her Commission colleagues to agree with her.  She telegraphed her "thinking" that we probably won't be getting state or federal (this has nothing to do with federal) money anyway, for reasons Ginny didn't specify.  Dan Samaria quickly picked up Ginny's message, and he parroted it.  "Unless I'm wrong," Dan qualified.  Well, that covers all the bases.  But Ginny's effort fell apart anyway, because 1) Will Tudor didn't agree, and 2) we have an ongoing contract with Dave Caserta, and it extends for two more years.  Apparently, someone misinformed Ginny.

The other problem with which our Commission struggled is the fact that they have no overriding vision.  Until the siege of Tracy Truppman, BP Commissions had "visioning sessions" at the beginning of each new Commission.  The idea was to form overall themes, or ambitions, for how each Commission would like to handle governing the Village.  A Commission could devote itself to cutting taxes, or improving the recreation facility, or whatever it wanted to do.  This kind of aim makes a lot of difference when the Commissioners have to confront a proposed budget, which either will or won't advance the Commission's vision.  Or, to approach it the other way around, whoever makes the budget can create one with a view toward whatever the Commission intended.  Which no one knows if the Commission never articulates or even forms intentions.  We're left with comments like some tonight, where one or another Commissioner might mention lowering taxes.  And another Commissioner might talk about taking proper care of Village employees.

Feeling around in the dark.  When there are no objects to feel.

Mac Kennedy introduced the small gesture of the Commission's no longer getting a stipend.  Dan Samaria argued that being a Commissioner was to him like a job.  I hope he gets paid a lot more for his day job than he gets from the Village.  Roxy Ross suggested a kind of compromise, where perhaps the Village will reimburse Commissioners for their municipal representative educational activities instead of paying them a stipend.  Ginny snapped back that in his 20 years, Bob Anderson never proposed to eliminate his stipend.  And Roxy Ross didn't propose to eliminate hers.  Ginny was wrong on both counts.  Bob was in fact part of Commissions that lowered their stipends.  The last time was in 2006.  And Roxy just proposed to handle the availability of Village fiscal support for Commissioners as reimbursement, only on condition that Commissioners actually take advantage of learning activities.

It's too bad a three hour meeting feels efficient.  But by comparison...  And with heavy guidance from Paul Winkeljohn, Roxy Ross, Mac Kennedy, and Chuck Ross.