Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Council needs more time

As I have shared with my fellow colleagues on the City Council, we need to spend more time together to make timely decisions on many outstanding discussions. Many times we discuss a subject and review 10,20, or 30 pages of documents just to not have enough time to discuss the item fully or even at all. The next time we might see it is months down the road. This is not good!

I remember that past Councils always afforded more time to get through all the issues on the table. It seems lately that the issues are piling up and not discussed in a time connected manner. It is like mental gymnastics sometimes. Lets put in the time to get the peoples work done!

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Lets get moving on the budget......

For this years budget that Councilman Rotering and I voted against, we cut our spending on our infrastructure about $750,000 and took about another $500,000 or more out of reserves to balance 2010's books.

At the time Nancy and I also asked that we immediately move forward on making additional core decisions to realign our government to have a better sustainable position in this new economic climate. While we were unsuccessful in getting a continuous process to proceed, we were promised that in March we would move on tackling these issues.

Well March has come and gone and we are next scheduled to talk about the budget April 26th, from 2:30 to 4:00 at City Hall. But instead of picking up where we left off with the City Manager proposing some $750,000 in expenditure reductions, we are back to first base talking about policy statements and looking at the optimistic tea leafs we have been fed for the last 3 years. I say plan for the worse and hope for the best.

We need to realign spending from large administrative purposes to boots and actions on the ground. This government over thinks and acts less than I think we should operate. We should be increasing infrastructure repairs instead of slashing them. Lots of work to be done and NOW is the time to start to finish the job.