Navigating Sherwood’s Forest

What’s the morale in City Hall?

It’s difficult for city officials to lift spirits among city employees when there’s a multi-million budget hole to close nearly halfway through the spending year and a layoff hatchet poised. Mayor Bill Finch submitted a budget to the City Council last year that had an $8 million gap assuming union concessions (or an equal number of layoffs) would close the hole. The city’s legislative body approved the budget.

It’s difficult to know just how big a gap now exists. City bean counters aren’t always forthcoming with accurate numbers for several reasons including keeping unions in the dark for negotiating purposes. Sometimes they’ll feign numbers in the cause of concessions. “If we tell them everything’s okay they’ll never agree to concessions.” Financial reports are issued to the City Council, but sometimes they cover the period a few months prior. The picture is never current.

The guy who knows the budget better than anyone on the planet is Tom Sherwood, director of the Office of Policy &  Management. That’s a fancy title for budget director. He’s the guy who built the budget, squirrels away some extra dough for a rainy day, talks mayors down from the roof of the City Hall Annex. He’s been doing this a long time. It’s almost like we need to check Sherwood’s cholesterol level every day. The budget is Sherwood’s Forest. He knows it completely when almost everyone else could get lost in it. Robin Hood knew something about Sherwood Forest, did he not?

Perhaps Sherwood wishes he had rich to rob to help the poor. Unions aren’t exactly rich these days. There was a day a taxpayer could scream “cut the fat” with meaning. Unions once had large numbers, but through the years jobs have been cut, hacked, unfilled. How much fat is left? When do you hit bone?

The city is telling unions to cough up the concessions to avoid the bone. Easy for you fat cats to say, the unions respond, you’re all making $100K and more.

It would nice to know how large the budget hole is not just for this budget cycle but also for next year. When we turn the page into 2011, department heads will submit their budgets, Sherwood will hack away at the requests with Finch screaming in his ear “We’re not raising taxes in an election year!” So how do they avoid raising taxes in an election year if some of the large revenue items the mayor’s counting on led by a regional sewer authority don’t happen?

You submit another budget with a large hole again. “This budget is balanced predicated on union concessions.” Don’t you just love municipal budgets with predicate holes? But how big will the hole be next year … $10, $20, $30 million? But what happens if you don’t close the gap? When does the money run out? When do you have trouble making payroll?

Want to take a walk though Sherwood’s Forest?