Wednesday’s planning commission report by the Advocate’s Alexandra Fenwick contained an important detail.
Before the city spends money on new projects, tax rates will already increase at least 1 percent due to interest on outstanding debt, Hamilton said.
For the first time in many years, Hamilton is advising that the city pay for a portion of its capital improvements by dipping into surplus funds from this fiscal year.
Hamilton is recommending that the city pay for the improvements with $11.6 million from the general fund and $2 million from the city’s $3.3 million surplus, and issue bonds to borrow the rest.
Let’s add a few more data points. The fact that the BOE construction committee just recently revealed that 5 schools will have to forgo renovations because they are out of money is not a very healthy sign that BOE capital spending has been managed very well. Operationally we all know that energy costs are projected to trend higher, which means that everything is costing much more to do than originally projected. We also know that city must tackle some major infrastructure repairs.
None of this was news back in 2002/2003 when the previous administration made the decision to bond away recklessly. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Your taxes are going up before the current administration can make any recommendations of needed capital spending, because it was oh so important to give a blank check to Stuart Opdahl to fulfill a campaign promise to “fix leaky school roofs.”
Instead, the roofs still leak, the construction snafus are legendary and the tax payer is left paying the interest on projects that never came to fruition.
I think I’ll have to dig out some of those minutes that chronicle the embarrassingly stupid decision making process that have lead us to this fiscal nightmare.
source: Advocate, Developers, flooded residents prod panel on capital budget, By Alexandra Fenwick, February 7, 2008
