Join the mayor to see what he wants to blow taxpayer money on over the next few years. I will have a post later today about some specific expenditures.
UPDATE: I just attended the meeting, and before I talk about the Mayor’s address, I first want to rant about something. While I don’t have a problem with an invocation at the beginning of the meetings, I think there should be some requirements.
1) No mention of a particular religion or God
2) Keep it brief
The pastor made a 10 MINUTE Invocation. I almost fell over, on top of that, his accent was so deep, I didn’t even know what he said. I caught Jesus, Israel, God and Amen. As it got into about 8 minutes, I started looking around the room, peeps were becoming a bit restless, and one city employee had his arm crossed and was giving the pastor a nasty look.
The irony of it all is that while citizens are only allowed 5 minutes for public testimony (you know, talking about city business) A pastor is allowed to rant for 10 minutes about all things Jesus and Christian.
There, my rant is done. I did laugh at the end when he said AMEN, the entire room almost yelled it out with him.
Well, now the budget. This graphic below troubles me. We spend 50% of our budget on debt service, employee wages and benefits and only 23% on actual capital improvements. Now if the mayor thinks this is a ‘prudent’ budget, I would have to disagree.
Think about this for a moment. While capital improvements are an investment in our community and city. Debt service, employee wages and benefits are here today and gone tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, we have to pay city employees a good wage to give us good service, but I have often been a fan of hiring fewer workers at a higher quality. Just look at the city clerk’s office, they had to replace a high quality clerk with 3 separate employees.
The mayor also mentioned in his speech that we have to take good care of the city employees because they also live here. Actually, a lot of them do not. I believe the number of city employees that live outside of the city limits is around 400.