The budget is done

Late Tuesday night our City Council passed unanimously the City’s budget for fiscal year 2011-12. Well they approved the first pass through; they will come back for more potential cuts on July 9^th. There are six items that the Mayor and Council want to go back and review with the idea of cutting more from the budget. Once again we must be vigilant as there will be major items up for discussion, including Community Service Officers from the Police department.

Watching this Council work through the budget process is worse than making sausage. There really has to be a better way to do this.

Personally, I thought the interaction between the Council and the department heads was very interesting. It helps to get a better understanding of the programs we fund but does it need to be adversarial? In theory, both the department heads and the Council members are on the same side working for what is best for your community.

It seems to me that some of the Council members seem to have trust issues with the City’s department heads. This has seemed to be the case from the very beginning of at least two of the Council member’s terms. These are also the Council members that rarely if ever meet with the City Manager. You would think that you would want to understand from the City’s Executive Officer the issues and concerns that can and will affect the City.

If they did meet with the City Manager more often they would understand the staffing issues that the City is faced with. They might reprioritize the things they want to address to help the staff accomplish the goals that they all want to see completed. Instead of adding things to get done and complaining when it’s not done on time.

We have a City Manager form of government here in Marina. That means it is the City Manager that runs the day to day business of the City. It is his responsibility to make the Council’s action work. It is not for the Council to micro-manage the City Manager.

I would suspect that if all the Council members met with the City Manager on a regular basis, not just a couple of them, our meetings would be shorter, the Council would better understand the issues and that they may even grow to trust the City’s hard working staff.

More later