Council puts aside extremism for budget

Compromise allows attitude adjustments

Attitudes that shaped the Memphis city budget vote Tuesday night didn’t need the evening’s nine-hour meeting to blossom, they were there when the council members first took their seats.

Council budget chairman Jim Strickland didn’t want a tax rate increase. Council member Janis Fullilove didn’t want any layoffs. Council member Shea Flinn said they couldn’t have it both ways and urged “reality” in their problem solving. Council member Harold Collins said compromise, creativity and courage would help the council thread the needle between taxes and layoffs.

And, with a “yes” vote all but promised by council member Lee Harris on Saturday, the vote to restore the 4.6 percent pay cut for city employees had new life after

it was killed at the first budget meeting last week.

Strickland didn’t get to keep the tax rate at this past year’s rate of $3.11. The budget season started with a $26 million gap because of the unprecedented drop in Memphis property values. It would take a tax rate of $3.36 to produce the same amount of tax revenue as last year’s $3.11 rate.

Strickland believes the tax rate, which had not increased since 2005, drives people out of Memphis. He voted against the prevailing budget that would cost a $3.40 tax rate and voted twice against setting the rate at $3.40, for what amounts to a 4-cent tax increase.

In her first remarks of the evening, Fullilove spoke plainly.

“Understand that I will not support any budget that calls for the layoff of any city employees,” she said.

But she ended up compromising on Collins’ budget calling for 50 layoffs instead of 100 and keeping the weights and measures department in the city budget. Shrinking the layoffs cost about 4 cents on the tax rate (or just more than $4 million).

Flinn, responding to council members’ applause-seeking speeches, said “you are not going to clap hard enough that Tinkerbell is going to come back.”

Collins didn’t want any layoffs either but his budget, which served as the platform for what became the city’s 2014 budget, initially proposed losing 300 employees through attrition, cutting 50 police vacancies, 20 fire vacancies and about 50 nonpublic-safety vacancies, for a savings of more than $15 million.

In the end, the council approved and Collins yielded to 50 layoffs, reinstating the police and fire vacancies and an overall 2.5 percent cut to the Memphis Police Department budget among other things.

It also restored the 4.6 percent pay cut that hit city employees two years ago, added 9 cents for reserves and gave money for community centers, the library system, code enforcement and Memphis Area Transit Authority.

“The last few years we as a council — and I include myself — viewed the glass as half empty and when you do that you want to cut and get rid of (things) or preserve or pull back or don’t invest or don’t give or continue to fight and want to reduce stuff,” Collins said. “If we see the glass as half full then we can be optimistic and progressive and creative.”

Edmund Ford Jr. said he finalized his budget plan Friday and it prioritized financial goals for the city — paying its bills, putting money toward debt service and reserves like the State Comptroller said the council should and putting money to the city’s library system, code enforcement department to fight blight, community centers and more.