With a midnight tonight deadline looming, City Council members had sessions planned for this week to finalize passage of a budget ordinance. Members of the council had sessions yesterday and one planned for today before a special meeting to pass the budget tonight. The meeting is set for 6:30 in the Council Chambers.
As of press time, Council Chairman Ron Quagliani said any answers to questions concerning the deliberation process would be premature as the situation was still fluid. Under the charter the council has until 11:59 p.m. on the first Thursday of May to pass a budget ordinance.
Quagliani and the council have spent the last six weeks scrutinizing Mayor Nancy Rossi’s $162.86 million budget package, proposed in March. The chairman said that meetings this week were continuing with department heads as part of that process.
At issue is the Municipal Accountability Review Board (MARB), which has called for further cuts in the budget as well as “structural changes.” Those changes center around not only spending, but in increasing revenues.
The MARB has been in communication with the mayor and there has been some communication with the council, according to past comments made by both the mayor and Quagliani. At one point the MARB had proposed a supplemental tax be imposed on the city after the budget is passed in order to hike revenues.
A set of questions was sent to Quagliani and Mayor Rossi in an attempt to see where the deliberations are headed, but Quagliani was reticent to answer anything because of those talks.
“I will be able to answer these questions after Thursday,” he said. “The council is still in the midst of its budget review process and are currently still meeting with department heads.”
Part of those discussions with department heads might include making cuts within the line items presented by Rossi in March.
Because of the state’s own budget problems last year, an estimated $8 million in grants and funding was part of the current budget. That money never came into the city. MARB is offering the city the funding for the new budget year and the next, but is looking to for leaders to make the necessary cuts so that further shortfalls do not happen because of dependency on outside sources, such as state grants.
According to Quagliani, any further answers to what might happen at tonight’s meeting would be only guessing.
“I can’t appropriately answer the questions you raise until after the process has been completed. There are still many moving pieces,” he said.
Any change the council makes to the budget requires a supermajority of nine votes on the 13-member council, according to the charter. Over the years, attaining the nine-vote threshold has been problematic. One of the hoped-for charter revisions now under consideration by the recently empaneled Charter Revision Commission is lowering that threshold.
Under the current process, the council’s finalized package is voted on as an ordinance, which requires only a simple majority. Failing to pass the budget would mean the Mayor’s Proposed Budget as originally set forth in March would become law by default.
The default passage of a budget has happened twice in the city’s history. The most famous was in 1991, when the budget failed, 8-5, and had problems that led to a $17 million shortfall. With a year the city was under state control.