Rah! Rah! Sis-Boom-Bah! - Lake Worth's budget

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Not staying for any New business, as I was certain all of it would pass, the City Commission adopted the Budget for 2013 on first reading as well as the millage rate, keeping it the same as last year. Raising taxes even when you have a budget shortfall, is not popular with the voters and our elected officials know how to play the game.

Vice Mayor Maxwell who has never approved any budget since he has been in office, made the motion to approve City Manager Bornstein's budget with Commissioner Amoroso, Mr. Second, seconding the motion. The budget passed on a 3/2 with McVoy and Mulvehill  dissenting.

I was really surprised at Maxwell, the one who has always maintained that he is the fiscal conservative. Not last night. No one operates his finances by spending more than he is taking in--unless, of course, you are the government.

Our general fund was down again this year by 2.6% but the Mayor cheered on saying that we were heading in the right direction. I felt as if I were at a pep rally. "Lead by hope, not fear," she said. We know where she got that "hope" thing from.

The "visionaries" thought it perfectly fine to take $424,000 from reserves (savings) and also rob the Simpkin Trust of $100,000 for library operations, a Trust that was NOT set up for operations. The plan is to deplete this entire trust over the next five years and to balance the budget if needed by robbing reserves, the main reasons why McVoy and Mulvehill voted the budget down.

They reduced our cost of electricity by 5% which will be $2.4  million less in revenue to the Utility and ultimately the city. I question the timing of this reduction. The 1.4% conservation fee elimination will be paid from the reserves but off everyone's electric bill. They also suggested that they might have to special assess us in the future for whatever. Not once was the idea of management reducing their salaries by 10% and making up the shortfall by further cuts were suggested. In fact, no ideas were brought forward for any other eliminations in the budget. Amoroso also threw the blame back on the public saying that not one person contacted him with any ideas.

We all learned that only 30% of the revenues we receive goes towards actually operating the City. 70% are fixed costs representing employee salaries, benefits and retirement packages. The Finance Director, Steve Carr, did say that these need to be negotiated. The commission trio did not respond to that at all and neither did the city manager, ALL politicians.

Even though the budgets that were formulated for 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 under city managers Paul Boyer and  Bob Baldwin raided our Reserves big time, we hired a city manager in April 2009 who stopped the bleed and ended the nonsense, Susan Stanton. She was condemned for making the difficult managerial decisions that got us on course and was eventually fired by this trio of "visionaries," Maxwell, Triolo and Amoroso. Now it seems we are right back to where we started with a commission and city manager avoiding the tough but necessary decisions. Although there are not millions being robbed from Reserves, it is still kicking the can down the road--the easy way out from making difficult decisions to maintain the health of our city.

The City manager did not update his department in the Budget but managed to get $15,000 for his monthly propaganda newsletter instead of doing a weekly city manager report on-line that is free where we actually got some information. The city commission had agreed to reduce its travel and education account from $30,000 to $15,000--so that is a wash. Also in the plan going forward is to close the pool. They will be spending over $100,000 for pool expenses every year but refuse to open the pool to make revenues even after stating in the budget that the pool is the number one summer activity.

This is no way to run our city.