What About Budget BOB?

Can you imagine, residents actually attending information sessions of the City Council’s Budget and Appropriations Committee? Yes, it’s like having nose pressed against the window watching your elected officials review budget items to act on a nearly $500 million budget and eventually set the tax rate. But it’s also an education into the number-crunching budget process. OIB friend John Marshall Lee has created a new coalition Budget Oversight Bridgeport. John has been attending budget committee meetings (as well as Andy Fardy, aka Town Committee) and files the report below.

This week’s budget sessions, Wednesday, 6 p.m. Public Facilities; Thursday, 6 p.m. Finance, Tax Collector and Tax Assessor, both meetings Wheeler Room, City Hall on Lyon Terrace; Saturday, City Attorney, Labor Relations, Civil Service, Capital Vote, 9:30 a.m. Hansen Building, Beardsley Zoo.

BOB (Budget Oversight Bridgeport – 2011) has come to town this year. Over forty Bridgeport residents, taxpayers, and voters indicated interest in attending the “hearings” scheduled by the City Council members on the Budget and Appropriations committee. In the second week of the hearings, at least ten of them have been present at the sessions, reporting their impressions of this vital annual financial review activity. Listening and learning produced several observations about the City process showing room for improvement:

• Council representatives present (whether on B & A or not) speak about their desire for more information from the current administration. Often the curiosity is parochial. “What is happening in my District?” was expressed by several during the discussion of the Capital budget. And Tom Sherwood has been asked for additional reports and/or more detail, for instance, on what funds have been spent in the past nine months from last year’s Capital Budget Plan. A review of posted B&A meeting minutes shows broad support for additional timely information from the Mayor’s Office.

• Financial statements and reports with numerical data are presented regularly to B&A. But the financial data is NOT included in the meeting minutes that are made public and posted by the City Clerk. They are not necessarily available to the public initially when the Council receives them. And they may not be available to the public at all, until after decisions have been made so that critical questions might be raised.

• The B & A has a busy schedule at budget time, principally the month of April into early May. A review of the meeting schedule for the past two years shows that about half of its regularly scheduled meetings were canceled. Perhaps that means that the Mayor’s office has no immediate business with B&A but in their role as representatives of the people and the last check and balance financially, why don’t they hold meetings in those “canceled” months on topics of “broad impact” for the whole City? Interviewing consultants on issues as diverse as trends in municipal finance, funding of retiree responsibilities, internal service funds for self-insured activities, and use of information technology to monitor funding and results of City activities are topics worthy of consideration. One month might be used to review the Certified Comprehensive Annual Financial Report of the City from the previous year. For 2009-10 the report runs 135 pages. What could be learned from a reading of the statements and especially the footnotes, that would make the annual budget review more meaningful? It would provide a view of the whole City financial scene.

• One of the observers compared the Hearing Schedule to the Department budgets and saw that neither the Mayor’s Office budget nor the Legislative Budget is reviewed in public hearings. They asked why this is so. Good question? Why not? For instance, if you look at the Legislative budget you will discover the stipend account of $9,000 per Council person annually or $180,000 that can be used for the types of consultants, research and inquiries by B&A for the benefit of the Council membership. It is never fully used. Let’s not necessarily cut it. Let’s use it in such a way that the whole City benefits. No new funds required. But possibly a better overall City result rather than turkeys for constituents, charitable contributions to organizations of your choice, or attendance at out-of-city municipal conventions with no public report to their District or the Council as a whole on what benefit a few days in Detroit or Denver means to the City relative to an expense of $20-25,000! Maybe they could study how other municipal legislative bodies handle financial check and balance duties?

Most BOB observers sympathize with the huge responsibility on the shoulders of the Council and Committee. Perhaps some of these suggestions might be reviewed and considered so that the overall product of legislative activity may improve. That is BOB’s focus, to improve our current governance to produce a more open system, with people accountable for their decisions and transparent in its processes including accurate and complete information easily available to all.