“It’s like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic”. The new Fort Lauderdale Budget….
Posted Under: City Employee Salaries,Ft Lauderdale City Budget Issues,Important Issues for Fort Lauderdale,Issues pertaining to the City Manager,Neighborhood Issues
“It’s like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic”. The new Fort Lauderdale Budget….
I was unable to personally attend the 2009-2010 Fort Lauderdale budget hearing at the Commission Chambers last night, but I was able to watch it on our local cable channel. What I witnessed was simply painful and sad. “It was like watching the crew on the Titanic re-arranging the deck chairs after the ship struck the iceberg”, one attendee mentioned to me afterward.
Last night’s budget discussion (or lack of discussion) from our new Mayor and Commission show that, once again, the Fort Lauderdale voter and resident will be paying for the laziness of our Commissioners and the continued spending addiction of George Gretsas, our City Manager.
For those of you with a short memory, the previous Commission had allowed Gretsas to grow the budget at over 10% per year from the time he arrived here, an unsustainable rate of growth for any city. This “spending addiction” of Gretsas was possible because of the windfall amounts of revenue that came in to city coffers due to the dramatic increase in the value of properties from 2003 to 2007. Budgets were set based on how much revenue the City Manager could get, NOT on what the actual cost to provide services should be. Rather than lower the tax rate burden to residents, Gretsas allocated every dime he could get his hands on. As of last year, our City’s budget was TWICE the size of other municipalities with the same population as ours.
So this year, one of the campaign pledges I repeatedly heard from Mayoral Candidate Jack Seiler and others running for their respective Commission seats was the need to establish financial accountability & the need to establish “zero based budgeting”, in order to reign in the city’s out of control budget (having grown from $345M to $605M in just 5 short years) .
I have said all along that trying to establish a zero based budgeting model here in Ft Lauderdale won’t work. (Asking City Department Heads to justify why they need to get the same amount of money as last year is like asking children to justify why they need candy. You’ll get all kinds of plausible explanations.) And last night I was proven right. Rather than a “zero-based” budget, Gretsas introduced essentially the same budget as last year and the Commission tentatively approved it, hook, line and sinker. Folks, there is nothing “zero-based” about this budget, except for the fact that there are way too many zeros in it. Even our City Auditor, John Herbst, states that this is not a zero-based budget. Why is our Commission accepting it as such?
Now in all fairness, not all of the blame can rest with our new Commissioners. Gretsas employed a common political tactic, which is to overwhelm the reader with data and charts, (much of it meaningless to the central concept of budget reform), and to provide this information to Commissioners at the last possible moment so they cannot fully understand what they are reviewing. This places the Mayor and Commissioners in the middle of a budgetary “jungle”, unable to understand the entire budgetary picture; instead they end up focusing only on what is at hand, and hack away at that.
This explains why last night, an inordinate amount of time was spent discussing certain unfilled positions, and whether the projected revenue for “red light runners” in the budget should be there. Valid points, but the significance of these amounts ($2-5 Million) represents nothing more than a rounding error in this bloated $602M budget. More appropriate questions that could have been asked by Commissioners prior to last night’s hearing should have been along these lines:
“Why is our City’s budget twice the size of other cities with the same population?”
“What should the appropriate amount of city spending be for our city of 170,000 residents?”
“Why, if we provided basic services to 180,000 residents for $345M five years ago, is it costing us almost twice that amount now?”
“Why are we still paying out “longevity pay” to City employees?”
“Why (if this is a “zero-based” budget), are there over $142M in carry forwards”? (These are unused departmental funds that are simply carried over from one year to the next.)
“Why do we have paid staff totaling 2,600 employees, when other cities our size on average have paid staff totaling just 1,600 employees?”
“Are you expecting taxpayers to fund another 5% to 10% pay raise to City employees this year with this budget, in light of the current economy?”
Challenging the City staff and asking these types of questions about the proposed budget in general could have started us down the road to making serious and needed cuts (on the order of $50M to $150M). Instead, the Commissioners, seemingly wringing their hands & knowing that the economic future of our City is in peril, nonetheless just accepted the bloated budget as given to them by the spending-addicted Gretsas, then congratulated themselves and city staff “for a job well-done”. All the wasteful spending that has occurred in the past will continue.
In conclusion, it appears that our current Commission is content to be “spoon-fed” by the City Manager, just as the last Commission was. This will most likely mean that for the next 3 years, our residents will continue to have apathetic elected officials, our city will remain visionless and taxpayers will have to dig deeper in their pockets to continue to fund the wasteful spending of our City Manager. It’s a shame. We deserve better.
Wednesday, September 23rd at 7pm in the Commission Chambers will be the last chance you have to voice your opinion on this matter. That will be when the Commission will most likely put their final stamp of approval on this mess. If you the voter and taxpayer don’t want this bloated budget to be approved, you better make yourself heard at that meeting, or via email or calls to your Mayor and Commissioner (954-828-5003). If you don’t, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Let me try to end on a high note. Thank you to Commissioner Charlotte Rodstrom who, alone among the Commissioners last night, raised the specter of the unfunded pension liability that Fort Lauderdale taxpayers are saddled with: over $325 Million dollars! This is money that you, the taxpayer will be required to pay to retiring city employees so that they can live in a lifestyle that most of us will never see. (Ex-Police Chief and Commissioner Roberts, as an example, is receiving over $100K per year as a retirement payout from you, the taxpayer). This huge liability is not even currently being shown in the budget. Charlotte brought this up along with the need to establish long term 2-5 year budget projections, something that has been needed for a long time.
Thank you, Commissioner Rodstrom! I wish that the rest of our Commission understood their responsibility to challenge the staff and the City Manager, instead of blindly & obediently following his recommendations.
Mark my words: Next year at this time when we are facing a $50M-100M shortfall (due to Gretsas’ continued out-of-control spending), our Commissioners are going to wish they could have a “do-over” with this budget! It will be too late.
Reader Comments
I’ve been seeing how our City’s budget has soared to the sky for years. And with the public servants, it has actually hit directly in front of my face.
Ft. Lauderdale is no better than the Senators and Congressmen who have made these “special” laws just for themselves. Unfortunately, it seems that we continually throw money at them to shut them up instead of fighting back equally as dirty as they do.
How? By writing emails, calling and bombarding them to the point of making their lives miserable. By talking to everyone you know making them aware. Most people (believe it or not) are not aware of our budgetary problems or the way we handle our public servants’ salaries. They are shocked to find out. I know I was.
We must also realize that Florida for the most part is of the Republican party which as we can see from our recent healthcare debate that their interests lie only with themselves and those who keep them with their million dollar payoffs, house on the beach, new pool, whatever alas, bribes. All of which is “illegal” but somehow it’s not illegal when it is proposed to our paid-by-our-taxes Senators and Congressmen.
We should also get together and contest our property taxes. There will be a line of people out the door. It will take them months to get through all of us. Lot’s of complaints hopefully making them work for a change. Not only are our property values low, but when they were high, they were still ripping us off perhaps not so much by using the established formula by which our taxes are calculated but by the fact that the money was there. Instead of allocating it to better our city of course it went to fill up their pockets.
I know that what I am proposing is minimal considering the situation but where do you start? Rioting in the streets? It may come down to that.
Isn’t there some sort of ethical duty to disclose conflict of interest. So, if I were one to benefit from this 325 million pension, do I not have the duty to abstain from voting on this issue or at least disclose it?
Earl, you get it. Seems like you and the the two budget advisory committee members who voted against approving the proposed budget are among the few who do. Additionally, you are able to articulate why the proposed budget is a disaster. I think lots of people are paying attention but don’t have the skill to analyze and present as well as you nor to pose the tough, insightful questions.
It was a packed chamber on Wednesday with many others watching on TV. I wish you had come to the meeting, signed up to speak and ask the Commissioners those 7 questions face to face. It would have started a much needed public dialogue… and outrage.
Everyone knows which issues I direct my energy and passion towards. I can do that because I know you are paying attention to this one. You ARE the person I want speaking on this issue for me and countless others, no doubt. Like the wizard of Oz, it’s time to come out from behind the curtain (blog) and step up to the podium.
WIth my gratitude,
Excellent article, Earl. I attended the meeting and also was appalled by the trivia discussed. So I rose to speak and seeing the attention span of everyone was worn ragged by the mindnumbing reading of the budget that had gone on for what seemed like hours, I kept it as short as I could. I mentioned only the following points.
I didn’t read from notes or a prepared speech, but below is my recollection of my remarks. I’m sure the transcript will not sound quite the same, but I DID raise a voice, and there was a smattering of applause
at the end.
1. Fire tax on the realestate tax bill is wrong. It should be part of the City budget and thus controllable like all other expenditures.
2. Capital bond proposals on the budget should be acted on now. Now, because the vast expenditures by the Congress will surely raise the cost of money severely. We already see the steep rise in the yield curve. Billions have been thrown away in the “cash for klunkers” and will never be re-cooped. Same for many of the other “recovery” expenditures. The weakness of the Dollar also portends a bleak ecnomic future. Big inflation is in the future.
3. Money from Washington will dry up. The recovery deficits will cause taxes to rise, the dollar to weaken, more social programs will be demanded to cover the rising tide of “jobless foreclosed homeowners”.
4. Spending our “rainey day fund ” is foolhardy – what if we get a hurricane? Where will we get money for recovery? Likely NOT from Washington.
5. We WILL get big further rises in forclosures and homeless families and individuals. Where are we going to get the funds for them?
6. John Herbst, our Auditor deserves praise for telling the truth that our so-called zero based budgeting is NOT zero based budgeting. We should Really take the funds away from departments when a person retires or quits etc, because this is the time to really evaluate if the position is needed. Our Department heads are good, and agressive, they want to hold on to funds for projects cancelled or delayed or positions vacated. The city Manager should take these funds and their budget so that the need can be truely reviewed and justified.
We need the Commission to really get behind the City Manager and support him in the need to really cut the budget and expenses.
7. My friend over there Jack Lokiensky the head of the Police Union has done a great job for the Union. Perhaps too good a job. The city needs to look at and control the rise in entitlements.
8. Things will get worse. My wall Street friends tell that most hotels can be bought for 40 cents on the dollar. The conversion of our tourism business model from 2 story motels to 4 star luxury hotels is in doubt, in danger. We likely will see some bankruptcies.
In summary, We need you Commissioners to REALLY support the City Manager and we really need to make bigger cuts in this emergency.
Earl myself and many residents need you to speak at the last budget public hearing for us… to have any chance at all… I will attend the hearing Earl I am not the public speaker… I speak from my heart and often do not express myself clearly and for more residents to understand the problems we face… you would be great for that you have the ability to explain it very well…. Earl you are so Right I strongly agree that The City of Fort lauderdale Tax payor is like on the Titanic… next year is when Mayor Seiler will deploy the Life boats and what I believe will happen then is large budget revenue gap next year and the elected Officials will not have the political will to cut Public services like Police which is over 50% of the current budget cost and be unable to find cut to balance the Budget and so if they do not cut more this year next year they will need to cut more or increase the Millage rate which will be another Hit on the Residents. So All the Best Ray
The way I look at it, if our house values do not go up you might as well kiss this whole place goodbye. There is no property value here. Do something to increase the value of our homes. Bring in new business, do something that will bring new poeple to Broward. Do something to stop people from leaving. At one time I thought we were trying to bring new businesses to Broward, Jobs!!!!
If you want to raise funds through taxes you have to have the people here to pay them. We are seeing loss of funds in our City and County budget due to loss of people.
I attended one of the earlier budget hearings and it was a joke. The commissioneres didn’t have a clue as to what monies were available and they were speaking about cutting off services…the ones the public most uses. Libraries, for example…now to be closed on Sundays, the day most people are free to use them. Parks, an inexpensive outing for the public. It goes on and on. They don’t realize the waste in spending..only cuts to hurt the general public