Present, future cuts discussed

DUNKIRK - The need to trim the city's current budget by $57,000 in response to this year's tax revenue shortfall has raised some thorny issues for council members here.

After discussing the matter for nearly two hours Thursday evening, council members settled upon correcting bookkeeping errors and directing city department heads to reduce budget totals by specific amounts to reach the $57,000 budget cut figure, but not before raising several other issues which will need to be addressed at future meetings.

During Thursday's special council session, city officials stirred up memories of previous budget debates, as they discussed the possibility of cutting the police force, eliminating the city's 24-hour police dispatcher service and relying more on the county's 911 operations, and converting to an all-volunteer fire department.

The police department is currently operating with four officers but in the process of hiring a fifth - perhaps making this an opportune time to stay at the four-officer level, as no one would have to be let go, council members said.

None of these proposals were approved or even voted upon, but all were mentioned as future possibilities because city officials fear that the city's 2011 budget, to be prepared later this summer, will require even more belt-tightening.

The need to slice $57,000 from the current city budget comes in response to recent news from Jay and Blackford county auditors that the projected tax revenue figures will be lower than originally anticipated.

The Blackford County decrease totals $4,515 and the Jay County drop will be $52,812, Dunkirk clerk-treasurer Jane Kesler said.

These figures are divided between general fund budget revenue and motor vehicle highway (MVH) street department funds. The totals for both counties will require reductions of approximately $9,627 for the MVH fund and $47,700 for the city's general fund.

At Thursday's meeting, council members voted unanimously to trim $9,700 from the street paving account in the MVH fund. This will leave approximately $63,000 in the paving account for 2010 projects.

To meet the $47,700 cut in the general fund, Kesler pointed out that after learning about the need for the budget reductions, she took a hard look at all the city budget figures once again and discovered that more money had been budgeted for health insurance than necessary, allowing $28,000 to be trimmed without sacrificing benefits.

She said a similar situation also existed within the Public Employees Retirement Fund, allowing $3,580 to be cut.

This left about $16,100 to be trimmed from the general fund budget accounts, Kesler said. Council members decided to split that figure among six different major city departments on a percentage of their budgets basis.

In the motion to accomplish this, council members directed that the various department heads decide where the necessary cuts in their departmental budgets will be made as soon as possible.

Those budget reduction totals include $6,650 from the police department, $3,800 from the fire department, $1,140 from the clerk's department, $1,330 from the parks department, $2,280 from the health department, and $218 from the mayor's fund.

The motion to approve the budget reductions was passed 4-1 with councilman Eric Bowler voting against it, saying that he didn't like the concept of the percentage reductions approach.

Also Bowler questioned why all city employees had been given cell phones, paid by the city. He made a motion to restrict the use of cell phones to just police officers and department heads. This motion passed unanimously, but Kesler said she would have to check further to determine the amount of savings which would be gained by the city, as apparently the city did not have a written contract with its supplier, Verizon, regarding use of the cell phones.

"People don't like change, but change is upon us," Bowler said.[[In-content Ad]]