I attended Edmonds Mayor Mike Rosen’s budget presentation earlier this week. It’s hard to present a 250-page document with multiple fund sources and many different threads in an hour. I thought he did a credible job. I have many, many questions. Some will be answered by reading the 250 pages. MyEdmondsNews.com covered it here.

In short, the mayor’s budget is balanced for the next two years, with some pretty serious caveats. Spending is less than revenues, so reserves increase a bit. This is a good thing. The long-term rate of growth of revenues still lags inflation, however you want to measure either. This means that there are increasing deficits over the planning horizon. There is time to address this, and that is the main reason for the fiscal task force the council created.

I worry about spending decisions that it was not reasonable to ask about in the presentation as the answers are lengthy. How much maintenance are we deferring on our built environment? This means roads, parks, buildings – anything that deteriorates over time. You can see the effect of deferred maintenance on I5. They are having to re-build the entire roadbed instead of just repaving it because they didn’t stay ahead of the maintenance. This is true for buildings and parks too – they cost more to fix than they do to keep working, the cost is just later.

I’m also a little worried about police staffing, which seems very low. I need to see comparisons with other similar cities and the practical implications on crime rates and other public safety concerns to have an opinion instead of a worry.

The mayor didn’t talk about the possible Esperance annexation, which is still a work in progress and probably better not to have in the initial budget until the city decides to do it or not. It will be important to understand the long-term implications of that choice on the fiscal picture for the city.

There’s an initial meeting of the task force next week where I will get to ask all my questions. I have a handful of personal goals for the task force, but it will be interesting to see where the other members want to take it.

1. A shared set of facts about the budget. We should be able to disagree about what the right spending level is without arguing about the math. Daniel Partick Moynihan had a particularly pithy quote in 1983 when talking about his work rebalancing social security:

“There is a center in American politics. It can govern. The commission is just an example of what can be done. First, get your facts straight. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Second, decide to live with the facts. Third, resolve to surmount them. Because, fourth, what is at stake is our capacity to govern.”

1983 January 18, The Washington Post, More Than Social Security Was at Stake by Daniel P. Moynihan, Quote Page A17, Column 5, Washington, D.C. 

• Comparisons of service delivery with local cities (with agreed list of cities) or with national benchmarks. We should agree on the list of cities. In the levy lift campaign the two sides were using different cities as comparisons, and it made it super hard to figure out the reality. Let’s not do that.
• Options for the council/mayor to consider and the financial implications of those options. We should agree on the impact. Council’s choice as to implementation.

I’ll try to write out my questions for the consultants and city finance staff here. Should be an interesting project, and I’m looking forward to reading the budget document.