Assembly whittles borough budget

PALMER — The 2012 budget is slowly making its way through the Mat-Su Borough Assembly and nearly every action the assembly has taken has been a cut.

Tuesday, having spent considerable time chopping away at things like the travel budget for various departments and budgets to hire contractors, the assembly wrapped things up by just giving the new borough manager John Moosey, who’s been on the ground for all of two weeks now, a figure: $2.39 million in cuts.

On Thursday, Moosey came back with most of those cuts and a promise to come back again at the next session with the rest of them.

With those cuts, Moosey also asked for two things. He wants to hire a contractor to make sure the right lessees get matched to the right parcels in the Port MacKenzie district and a media design specialist to put together presentations to sell grant-givers on borough projects.

“I kind of view this as more than someone to do neat stuff for us,” Moosey said, using an analogy of a salesman in a private company. “This is our salesman for grants.”

The assembly didn’t object except to ask Moosey get his $100,000 for that port consultant out of interest paid on a permanent fund tied to the borough’s land management department. That way, explained Assemblywoman Cindy Bettine, the money wouldn’t come from taxes and would therefore not bump up the tax rate.

A lot of the cuts discussed last week involved funds where the borough had budgeted for a worst-case scenario. For instance, the borough had set aside more than $300,000 to pay for insurance if every on-call responder in the emergency services department signed up for a program that hasn’t proven terribly popular. Only 28 of 550 of them were in the program as of Thursday.

Mayor Larry DeVilbiss said he sees a problem here. The borough winds up with a surplus at the end of most years because of it.

“We’ve consistently over-budgeted and underestimated revenues,” he said. “We are taxing and accumulating more than we are spending.

Assemblyman Mark Ewing put it a little more succinctly, speaking as a taxpayer.

“I am totally opposed to the borough building up a savings account with my money,” he said.

The danger with that, Moosey said, is that it sometimes leads to a situation where a department will spend money it doesn’t have to in order to avoid losing it in the next year’s budget. He said he wouldn’t let that happen.

“If it doesn’t need to be spent I don’t want it to be spent, even if it’s in the budget,” he said.

Another issue — you have to be sure of your numbers if you’re going to budget so tightly. You’re in trouble if tax revenue doesn’t cover the budget.

“I don’t want you to have to come back in 2012 or 2013 and have to make a correction by increasing the millage rate,” Moose said.

The assembly is next scheduled to discuss the budget Monday.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.