Palmer city budget shrinks by 10 percent

PALMER — Belts will tighten around the city this year.

City Manager Doug Griffin, entering his first budget cycle since being chosen to replace Bill Allen this past fall, said last year’s budget weighed in at around $11.5 million and he’s managed to shave 10 percent off of that. To be fair, he said, this past year saw the city embark on some unusually ambitious projects.

Still, the 2011 budget is $10.3 million, meaning the city has managed to trim $1.2 million.

“I delivered a budget to the city council that cut quite a bit out. We didn’t fill some vacant positions, we’ve consolidated some departments, we’ve kind of streamlined management,” Griffin said.

Mayor DeLena Johnson, also on her first budget cycle since winning election this fall, said she thought Griffin did a good job putting the city’s budget together.

“I think that the administration understood that that was the will of the council, so they presented to us a slimmed down budget,” she said.

She said cuts are never fun, but these were the right cuts to make.

“It’s hard to see anything go,” she said.

She noted that most of the cuts were ongoing, rather than one-time, expenses. They’re real cuts, she said, which the city — if it can maintain them — will benefit from in future budget cycles.

Griffin said he removed the city’s department of community services, which was kind of a catch-all department that ran things like parks, the ice arena, the golf course, library and visitor’s center. Most of those duties will fall to public works, while some will go to the community development department.

He said there was a vacant position as kind of a hybrid airport manager/economic development director that he has eliminated. Griffin figured the airport would also fall under the watch of public works and that economic development would become a duty his office performed.

“That’s a big concern. Economic development is something that we really want to do,” Griffin said.

But he thinks the city manager’s office can handle it.

He said the council had expressed concern about the city’s fund balance, saying it was too low. The size of the city’s fund balance is generally stated in number of months of city operations it can pay for.

“Our fund balance was not where they wanted it to be in terms of having a little cushion there,” Griffin said. “I set a goal of trying to have at least three months operation funding in there and we’ve only got a little over two months in there.”

The budget isn’t set in stone, and Griffin and Johnson said city administration might end up back before the council seeking an increase.

And the council made its own cuts. It didn’t, for instance, approve money Griffin had requested to hire a lobbyist in Juneau for this coming legislative session. The council thinks he can do that job himself.

“I don’t know if they’re trying to test me to see what I’m made of. I don’t know what the deal is,” he said. “All I say is if we don’t do as well as I think we could have done I’ll be the first one to tell you that next year we should maybe re-think the idea of having a lobbyist.”

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