If It Ain't Broke...

The city council and city staff have finally found something they can agree on: This year's city budget process stinks. Normally, the city manager prepares a "policy budget" in June as a framework for the budget which council adopts in September. "It used to be that a couple of months before we'd vote, the manager would pass out 28 pounds of paper and then after a month we'd start having public hearings," explains Councilmember Beverly Griffith.

This year, however, the public hearings were held before the policy budget was even drafted, ostensibly to provide City Manager Jesus Garza with public input he could include in his deliberations. Following the hearings, though, Garza's hard numbers were not available to the council or to the public until August 13, only a month before the final budget will be adopted by council. That means less time for councilmembers to ask city staff questions and mull things over, and fewer chances for Austin's resident budget hawks to squawk about boondoggles.

The new budget process "has met with mixed reviews," quips Griffith in drastic understatement. In fact, absolutely no one -- from Garza himself to the members of the citizen boards and commis-sions -- is happy with the new process.

Although most fingers are pointing at the politically immune former councilmember Ronney Reynolds for originally framing the clumsy new process, the revisions, of course, had to pass muster with the previous council. Originally, there were to be five public hearings on the budget. Four hearings were scheduled in the first week of the new council's reign, but, claiming packed schedules, the council immediately shrunk that number to two -- held June 25 and 26. Without the benefit of the policy budget, the hearings primarily consisted of well-organized special interest groups -- such as parks, EMS, and libraries -- wringing their hands over the fate of pet programs. "It had everyone scrambling. Everyone was down there in force because nobody knew," explains Mary Kay Isaacs of the Parks and Recreation board.

Sue Edwards, director of EMS, agrees that the process was a mess. "I would like to see a more simplified budget process. It is easier to respond to if you have something you're responding from," she says. Unfortunately, since the groups were mainly focused on bolstering successful programs or defending programs on the chopping block, the hearings imparted little useful information about citizen priorities. "I was concerned with all the people that we didn't hear from. There were a lot of issues not represented," observes Councilmember Bill Spelman. Although they voted themselves into this mess, the council has been as out of the loop as anyone else. In fact, even number hounds like Councilmember Daryl Slusher had no idea that the policy budget was going to come out so late in the game. "One day the city manager just said `Since we're not going to have a policy budget...,' " says Slusher, recalling his surprise.

Garza admits, with some bewilderment, that the council did not seem to understand the ramifications of changing the process last year. "I certainly will take the responsibility, but I would hasten to say that I thought it was clear that this is the way we were supposed to be doing it," he says. To get through the crunch, most councilmembers have been using a mock budget pieced together by Griffith's office from the five-year budget forecast released in June.

"We're the same way," says Director of Financial Services Betty Dunkerley, who oversees the budget process. "We don't know what's in and what's out. This is a tough year," she admits.

In all the confusion, everyone seems sure of one thing -- they are not going to do it this way next year. "The unanimous input I've gotten from boards and commissions is that they would like the old process reinstituted," says Garza. "This year has served as a lesson to us. The way we did it a year ago was a better process with more information. We liked the policy budget and we're not going to have a problem going back to it." -- Kayte VanScoy