What They Said: Florissant Council Members Voice Thoughts on 2012 Budget

Before passing the 2012 fiscal year budget for Florissant, six city council members spoke their respective pieces about the budget following the second reading. 

We're giving you excerpts of a few of the council member's spiels regarding the budget. 

Ward 8 Councilman Mark Schmidt

... We spent a few days going over the budget. I know it was hard work on our mayor and administration, I’d like to thank them for taking the time and submitting a balanced budget to us this year. However, saying that, there were a couple of things in there that were amended during our budget sessions, one primarily which I wasn’t real happy with but it passed by majority, and that was our overtime expenditures ... For the police department, sewer lateral, public works, parks, and members of this council decided that they would slash that budget basically in half, and just told department heads to suck it up and deal with it. We’ve done this the last two years, and I won’t say, I won’t call it a failed experiment, but both past two years, department heads had to come back for more money at supplemental budget time and later for overtime. That’s why I thought this was a very, very realistic budget for the overtime.

Ward 7 Councilwoman Karen McKay (from her written statement)

Over the last few years, Florissant has survived some of the hardest financial pits in its history. And this upcoming year is not going to be much different. Council receives a proposed budget from the administration, although in the end, council makes the final determination as how the budgetary funds are to be used. Some members on this council and in the administration have walked away from the budget meetings unhappy. In the end, council has the responsibility to make the final determination on budgetary spending ... To keep the city solvent, council must insist that the administration work with this governing body by reviewing expenditures monthly. Also, department heads must receive management guidance from the administration on dealing with any additional overtime not budgeted ... In this box is the 2012 budget, and it has my support, and it is my gift from Ward 7.

Ward 3 Councilman Joe Eagan

In my very short time on this council, we’ve made it very clear to the administration that we wanted the budget that was reasonable expectations of the funds that would be utilized throughout the year. Numerous council members, including myself, have expressed consternation at the department heads coming back to ask for money in the third or fourth quarter of the year. The administration gave us such a budget. A budget that reflected, most importantly, the anticipated amount of overtime that the various departments would need. In the 11th hour of the budget proceedings, we slashed this budgetary proposal with an intent of maintaining the ways of old. I’m both disappointed and quite frankly, a little terrified. The last two years have been fairly consistent concerning the actual overtime budget used. Each of these two years, the council underfunded the departments, and they’ve had to come back and ask for additional funds later. It’s important to note though, that overtime use was dramatically down from previous years in 2007, 2008 and 2009, somewhere between $100 to 200,000 … There is a difference however between watching the people’s money and the failure to provide basic and essential services to our citizens ...

Ward 6 Councilman Pat Stinnett

I thnk all of us recognize the fact that the employees of the City of Florissant and the employees of the police department are all good, hardworking people. We all recognize the economic status and economic times we’re in across the country. Times are hard right now; money is limited. We have to wisely use the few dollars we have. We have to be good stewards of the citizens’ money. When we look up here and decide that we’re going to reduce the police budget 40 percent,  I believe that could possibly compromise the security of our citizens. When we talk about reducing the public works by 50 percent, again, we’re talking about the safety of our citizens to fund other means. We need to keep these monies where they belong, available for overtime. If you look at the 2011 overtime budget, the proposed overtime budget is $410,000. The adopted budget is $205,000. That’s across all departments, and we can all see that’s a 50 percent reduction in the overtime on the budget. There was a $136,000 restored to that overtime budget through the end of October; there’s still another month in 2011. That’s a 33 percent overtime increase that we had to go back and refund … We’ve got a track record that shows we’re going back consistently and adding funds to various departments, so why are we fooling ourselves to go back? … I think that personally, I commend the departments out there. I think they’re doing a wonderful job of controlling their overtime and expenditures the best they can. For those reasons, I cannot support the budget as it is proposed today.

Ward 4 Councilman Keith English

With all due respect to our newly appointed council members, I’ve been in office now for five years, and I’ve witnessed overtime pay spent where it shouldn’t be spent, such as privacy fences being put up on overtime for air-conditioning units at the police station. I’ve seen during heavy snows, instead of plowing our streets, we’re plowing parks when we should be shutting our parks down, I think this is a common sense budget. I believe the majority of the council voted on cutting the budget for numerical erasons not only for financial, I believe cutting the overtime budget was a smart thing to do … I don’t have a problem with the administration coming back and saying, “We had a hard snow, and we need more money,” and we coming together as a council to decide what to do. I collectively support the budget that is before us tonight and would not support any amendments on this budget.