City still seeking ideas to cut budget

Members of the Yuma City Council tried to feel their way toward a resolution of the city budget Monday, seeking strategies to effectively cut costs within a $212 million plan which includes a property tax rate increase of almost 41 cents, without forcing departments to do “less with less” for the public.

Suggestions brought to the table included increasing fees or consolidating programs in parks and rec, a delay or freeze in filling new positions, a reduction in funding given to outside agencies and an across-the-board reduction for departments whose proposed budgets for this year exceed their budgets from last year.

Property tax revenues go into the city’s general fund, which is budgeted at $64.2 million in expenditures for next year under the staffproposed budget. About 65 percent of that goes to police, fire, and other public safety-related functions, and once it became clear there wasn’t much council support for cutting costs in those areas the onus fell onto other departments, as well as broader measures.

City Administrator Greg Wilkinson said at the outset Monday officials were willing to implement a hiring delay on non-critical positions, but officials didn’t have any estimate for how much money that might save, to the annoyance of some on the council.

“I was under the impression last week that we’d have something we can work with, and we still have nothing we can work with,” Mayor Doug Nicholls said.

“The translation of that attrition rate into a dollar figure that we can remove from the budget is a very, very tricky thing,” Budget Director Pat Wicks responded.

While most parts of the annual budget are based on assumptions and projections, employee salaries and benefits make up about 80 percent of the general fund, so assuming 10

percent of employees, for example, will leave in the coming year without knowing who they are and what they make, means that being off on those projections can be “disastrous” for the city, he said.

He said he would come up with a number for the council to look at for tonight’s work session, the second of three consecutive evenings when the fiscal plan is expected to be under scrutiny from the council.

Wilkinson said officials made $1.9 million in cuts before presenting their proposed budget, including eliminating five unfilled jobs each from the police and public safety dispatch areas.

Years after the Great Recession stopped most of the growth happening in the area, the city is still coming under increased pressure from the state’s budget woes along with health care, with a 20 percent increase in insurance costs he said is mostly due to the federal Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

Councilman Gary Knight’s initial budgetcutting idea of closing Fire Station 6, the city’s newest and slowest in terms of direct calls, was one he said he knew would be unpopular but would save $560,000

a year. “But we said everything’s on the table,” he said, and the station was built near 32nd Street and Avenue C in anticipation of subdivisions which largely didn’t materialize. Personnel would be shifted elsewhere.

Fire Chief Steve Irr said those crews are often used to back up busier stations. Nicholls, Deputy Mayor Edward Thomas and Councilmember Gary Wright said they would oppose that idea, and it was dropped.

Wright asked for an overview of positions and programs in the parks and rec department, looking at the enrollment and revenue from programs and job descriptions for positions.

“We have to make some hard choices, and hard choices are going to have to come either this year or next year. But we cannot continue to raise property taxes because that’s going to impact our sales tax, and our revenue. And I want to protect our revenue,” he said.

Thomas advocated looking at a 5 percent reduction to the $1.5 million budgeted for outside agencies, which include Yuma Visitors Bureau, Yuma County Intergovernmental Public Transportation Authority, Yuma Metropolitan Planning Organization, Crossroads Mission and other organizations.

He said he wanted to look

first at the outside agencies, then possibly at user fee increases for parks programs, and reducing personnel as a last resort. The city currently has about 1,200 fulland part-time employees.

Councilmember Leslie McClendon said a 5 percent reduction would not make much of a difference, and some of the agencies offer services which would affect public safety and other areas if they were left unfilled. “We need to look at higher dollar rather than smaller, because we can nickel-and-dime this budget to death and it’s not going to make the impact we need,” she said.

McClendon did not specifically talk about Yuma Visitors Bureau, where she is an employee, and which gets the most money of any outside agency at $650,000, though the majority of that doesn’t come out of the general fund.

Knight said the council should consider reducing or eliminating the $200,000 that goes annually to YCIPTA, which he said was supposed to be a short-term commitment to the agency when it was formed. “It was with the express idea that this was going to be temporary and they would find their own funding,” he said, whether it would have to come out of a voterapproved measure or some other source.

The staff-proposed budget includes raising the

property tax levy to the highest allowable level under state law, $11.7 million, which equates to a property tax rate of $2.2440 per $100 of assessed valuation. Nicholls almost ended the meeting without any discussion of what a more palatable rate might be, but Knight asked what other council members thought about a “multiple choice” sheet of options Wilkinson had given them.

Nicholls and Knight said they might be able to accept a $2.0524 property tax rate, which would generate about half of the $2.2440 maximum rate proposed by staff. The other council members didn’t comment. All seven members were there at the beginning of Monday’s session, but Councilmember Cody Beeson left about a third of the way through.

The council adopted a preliminary budget earlier this month with the higher property tax rate, but with the understanding there would be cuts before the final budget was adopted. Wright cast the only vote against the preliminary budget.

Tonight’s council work session begins 6 p.m. in the council chambers at city hall, 1 City Plaza. The council is scheduled to adopt the final budget at its Wednesday regular meeting, which begins 5:30 p.m. in the council chambers.