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8/9/2010
City of Appleton begins to cut jobs
Appleton’s $2.5 million (or $3M or more) projected 2011 budget gap deserves close attention. Employee cutbacks have begun. Interesting that a New York Times piece Saturday detailed municipal cutbacks throughout the nation – “governments go to extremes as the downturn wears on.”
Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system.
…. Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.
Etc., etc.
In an article earlier last week, the Times talked about (imagine!) actual pay cuts for local and state government employees “as a last-ditch effort to avoid layoffs.” Welcome to the world, I guess…
The agenda for the City of Appleton’s Finance and Administration Committee this week includes notice of a couple of “Table of Organization” changes. Ok, they’re small, but it’s something.
- The Police Department details their request to eliminate a part-time clerical support position in the Operations Bureau. "In an effort to maximize efficiency, we are currently attempting to distribute the duties form the Operations clerical position to other positions throughout the Department."
- Valley Transit asks to delete a position as well. "Through the process of developing Valley Transit’s 2011 budget, staff identified a way to save 2010 budgeted dollars while at the same time providing more service to our customers." [Read more, p. 4 of the .pdf.]
Well, it’s a good start.
Appleton’s budget gap will only come in at $2.5 million (or $3M or more) if employees agree to wage and benefit cost freezes. The Appleton budget story via NBC26 included the perspective of Appleton’s firefighters.
In an e-mailed statement, Scott Pelkin, the Appleton Firefighters Local 257 Vice President, told NBC26:
"We're willing to work with the city where we can and try to help them out with the budget shortfall, but on the other hand, we are not going to balance the city budget on the backs of all the employees."
Stay tuned. Where do you think the cuts should happen? (Please don’t say eliminate waste and fraud…) What if employees don’t agree to wage and benefit freezes?
Jo Egelhoff, FoxPolitics.net
COMMENTS
I'd say salary freezes are a priority. If they don't agree they can be without the job. I along with the other 50 people i work with have been on salary freeze for 5 years! (Our company started noticing the economy fall and took action 5 years ago, thankfully most of us still have jobs.)
CIty employees cannot expect to continue to get raises while the rest of us are either frozen or jobless. very few people are getting raises right now, and city workers/public servants should be no different when they are funded by us, the ones on salary freezes and losing jobs.
joe (Mon Aug 09 08:32:31 2010)
As an Appletonian, I'm worried about tax increases as a result of these deficits. Is there a limit as to how much the city can raise them? Maybe that's where the discussion has to start. I would hope for no more than a 2% increase, with inflation as low as it is. And then, divide up the deficit, and give each department a certain percentage that they have to reduce, in whatever way possible. Or is that being too naive?
Mike
Mike P. (Mon Aug 09 09:18:02 2010)
I daresay it does not take a Phd in Economics to develop some cost-saving policies for the City of Appleton. Local government is now a "big business" industry and vested in the continuation of its own growth
Come on Mayor & Council& Dept heads & Unions & employees...let's start
by having all city employees pay their own Wis retirement share instead of the taxpayers paying the full 100% WRS. Where is the ownership in your own retirement? Let's do a review of similar salaries in the private sector to the ones in the public sector, including benefits, to illuminate the truth of our current situation. Also, we can look to some select privitazation of functions that the public sector is no longer doing economically compared to the private sector. How about putting out for bid all the mowing on city owned rights of way?
Tax and fee increases are NOT the answer. We are taxed enough, thank you!
Dave (Mon Aug 09 11:37:16 2010)
Well Jo you have said that you read Krugman. This column addresses this subject.Here is a small excerpt;
***We’re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions — essential services that have been provided for generations — are no longer affordable. And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.
And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.
But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.
In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter. ***
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09krugman.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
If you are willing to read and consider something that may not fit the ideaology you have adhered to then check it out.
Dean Weichmann (Tue Aug 10 05:42:37 2010)
Jo, you say don’t tell me they should cut waste, but I work for the city and, I can tell you there is plenty of waste.
One particular thing I can think of is the city paid an engineering firm to do a study the firm decided we need this improvement got the improvement at a cost of $50,000 and not one employee can tell you why we got it done.
I have more examples when you want to know the really truth
joe (Thu Aug 12 16:32:43 2010)
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