City officials have approved a $124 million budget that adds a
handful of positions but delays the potential for deep cuts until
September, when council members will grapple with a $4.7 million
shortfall between revenues and expenditures.
Gilroy – City officials have approved a $124 million budget that adds a handful of positions but delays the potential for deep cuts until September, when council members will grapple with a $4.7 million shortfall between revenues and expenditures.
The budget, approved Monday night in a 6-1 vote, adds a new police officer and a fire battalion chief, changes one of two code enforcement officers from part-time to full-time status, and calls for the hiring of a budget analyst halfway through the fiscal year that begins July 1. The new spending accounts for a combined $403,233 of the city’s $47.7 million operating budget, more than 75 percent of which goes toward fire and police services.
The new spending comes despite council calls for a plan to rein in multimillion dollar overruns in yearly spending. The 2007-08 budget predicts the city will spend $4.7 million more than it generates in property taxes, sales taxes and other revenue sources. That rate of spending threatens to erase Gilroy’s $27 million budget reserve in six years.
But those figures are not as stark as they appear, according to City Administrator Jay Baksa, who has called the current budget a “place holder” until the city devises a long-term plan to align spending and revenues. Baksa pointed out that Gilroy’s yearly shortfalls have consistently fallen below projections. Past budgets predicted a $4.7 million deficit for the current fiscal year, for instance, but various cost-cutting measures allowed the city to trim the figure to roughly $2.4 million, according to Baksa.
“The advantage we’ve got going for us is we don’t have to make cuts immediately,” Baksa said. “This (gap closure plan) will be a document that hopefully will last for a long time. It will be a comprehensive guide to cost reduction that the council can pull off the shelf when they need to.”
The budget council members will receive in September will include itemized priority lists from each city department, detailing the order in which personnel and programs should be cut.
“We can’t turn our attention to just one or two areas and forget that the community as a whole needs to be served. There’s not one member that doesn’t want more police officers, but the bottom line is that we’ve got to balance the budget,” Pinheiro said.
Pinheiro’s remarks Tuesday aimed in part to deflect new criticisms by Councilman Craig Gartman, who cast the sole dissenting vote on the budget due to what he called dwindling support for police protection. The budget, he said Monday, would lower protection from an average of roughly 1.4 officers per 1,000 residents to 1.32. The criticism is a new one for Gartman, who has spent recent weeks blasting his council peers for approving raises for roughly 20 city managers under a controversial shift in pay ranges. He also has demanded that the city close the $4.7 million spending gap immediately – a move that Baksa said could require firing between 60 and 80 staff members, or nearly a quarter of the city’s work force.
Asked how he reconciled a call for additional police with his demands to quickly scale back spending, Gartman said the matter boils down to priorities. He said, for instance, that he would have preferred to cut funding for a Web site designer – a position approved in last year’s budget – and roll back the pay range increase that will cost the city $200,000 annually.
“For the cost of a Web site designer, we could have another police officer on the street,” Gartman said. “If we had not given the raises to the upper management, I think we could have hired two to three offices for the same amount of money. It’s important that we focus on the primary responsibility of local government, and that is to provide protection and necessary services to the community. If there is extra money left over, then I’m all in favor of adding services, but we can’t lose sight of our core responsibility.”
Gartman announced June 8 that he plans to challenge Pinheiro in November for the city’s top elected seat, has made public safety a big issue in recent weeks.
The city’s five-year budget calls for 32 new positions, including five new police officers. Of those 32 positions, 18 would be financed by sales taxes and other revenues that comprise the city’s general fund, while the remainder are considered “revenue neutral” positions financed by fees and other money generated by individual departments. By 2012, the city expects its staff roster to grow from its current 286 to 312 full time employees.
