Without appearing to understand exactly what they were voting for, city council members, in a series of convoluted votes, approved Tuesday night amendments to the current fiscal year budget that, among other things, pigeon-holes funds for additional Christmas decorations in City Square Park and a new way to illuminate the city’s iconic downtown water tower.
Other budget amendments approved by the council included designating funds that could be used for the November road bond election and parks in the new uptown district.
Originally identified as one budget item on Tuesday’s council agenda, it ultimately took four separate votes to approve it after council member Dex Ellison successfully divided the item.
Council members had little problems with the bulk of the budget earmarks, rather routinely approving 96 percent ($8 million of the $8.375 million) of the money specified in the agenda item. That involved $4.5 million for the uptown parks (approved unanimously) and $3.5 million for expenses related to the road bond election (with only council member Ashlee Bradshaw, without explanation, voting against that).
But, boy, did they ever get bogged down on that last 4 percent, the $375,000 segment. And during the discussions, it felt as though council members were thinking they were actually spending money with their votes on this measure, when all they were doing was designating existing funds for spending at a later date. In fact, this agenda item did not even mandate these amounts would ever be actually spent on the items being discussed.
“Do we have a cost breakdown from these estimates on the $200,000 and the $175,000?” Ellison asked. “Do we have the invoice or the quotes?”
As the city’s Finance Director Perwez Moheet tried to explain to council members, these figures were nothing more than estimates arrived at by researching what other cities spend on similar items. “We’re not going to have a final quote until we know this is going to be approved,” Moheet said. “That’s when we’re going to get bids.”
That’s also when council approval will be required for money to be actually spent on those items. But council members either didn’t hear Moheet, understand him, comprehend what they were voting on or a combination of all three.
“So is there not a way to get a stronger look at those costs before that?” Ellison asked. “On the ($375,000 items) I would like to have some more information on those because this is a pretty large ask for a budget amendment,” even though, as mentioned earlier, it amounted to around 4 percent of what had been approved without much debate only seconds earlier.
Ultimately the council approved the $200,000 earmark for the Christmas lights unanimously and the water tower lighting on a 4-3 roll-call vote with Ellison, Yvonne-Flores Cale and Michael Tobias voting against it.
Tobias also talked as though the council was voting on actually spending money, instead of designating General Fund money not already allocated to any other expenditures.
“This is $375,000 in lights,” Tobias said. “If we are going to invest that, personally I would like to see what these decorations would be, what would they look like, the brand we are going to. If we had a breakdown on what each light would be — this is what we’re buying, this fixture and it’s going to look like this and it’s going to be this large. How far is the display going to be? Just in the square or all the way up and down Center Street? Those are the kind of things I’d like to see, I would feel more comfortable with this before we invest this much money on these types of displays. Let’s see what we’re actually going to be seeing.”
That would be a logical ask if the council was actually debating “buying” anything or “investing any money” in anything, but that’s not what this agenda item called for. It only asked that money be set aside so that purchases might be made at a later date. And, one would imagine, all those specifics Tobias seeks would be carefully itemized before the council votes on actually spending the money. In fact, if he so desired, Tobias could insist those specifics be carefully itemized in any related future spending item.
Although the item specifically said it was “increasing the total appropriations for expenditures in the General Fund,” Tobias also said he didn’t know where the money was coming from. “Was this going to be coming through hotel tax or anything like that?”
Ellison also appeared not to understand completely the source of General Fund dollars. In his successful move to get the $375,000 derived from Park Dedication Fees instead of the General Fund, Ellison pointed out that Park Dedication Fees “are paid for by the development community so not ad valorum property taxes, whereas General Fund items are through that manner.” That’s not completely true. Property taxes only account for 30 percent of General Fund dollars. And what’s even more important is that sales taxes account for 27 percent and these items are designed to increase sales tax dollars, especially from those who live outside the city. The larger the income the city collects from sales taxes, the less it needs to rely on property taxes to fund the city’s day-to-day operations.
The water tower lighting would enable the city to reflect different color lights off the tower to commemorate different occasions, such as bathing the tower in green lights on St. Patrick’s Day or in pink during Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
On this item, council members Ellison and Flores-Cale appeared to be suffering from short-term memory loss, arguing the council could put this item off until the next fiscal year budget even though moments before they approved an amendment to make sure General Fund moneys would not be designated at all, this fiscal year or next.
And Mayor Travis Mitchell fell back on the familiar, but still completely irrelevant standby: “So do we have a sense on what this is going to look like, how they’re going to be constructing the lights? My concern is I haven’t seen what the plans are for it.”
And that would be a relevant concern if the agenda item in question actually involved spending money on this project. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t even obligate the council to spend money on it anytime in the future. All this agenda item calls for is this: If this council is presented with specific plans sometime in the future involving downtown Christmas lights and illuminating the city’s most famous landmark, then it has available funds already set aside in the budget to use for those purposes.
But I guess that concept is beyond the intellectual grasp of too many council members.
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