Budget

Budget

Budget Sustainability Focus Group

Have you ever tried to read a municipal budget? It can be pretty confusing.  To make things easier, we created the Citizen's Budget Guide (87).  This will help you to see where the money goes.  It also details the financial situation facing the City of Loveland with revenue loses due to State budget cuts including the Local Government Fund (a once shared revenue source between municipalities and the State) and the Estate Tax.

Cuts in revenue will force the city to cut back our basic services in ways that will be very real and noticeable to all residents, to find replacement revenues, or some combination of the two.

City council will start by trimming the city’s budget to live within the new, lower revenues. This will be unpleasant because the city has been quietly cutting costs over the last several years, and the “low hanging fruit” was picked a long time ago. The city’s budget cannot simply absorb these state cuts without real, very perceptible changes to our service levels.

Because service reductions will affect different residents differently, the city is starting a citizen engagement process to gather your thoughts on how to shrink city services. Ultimately, all of us as residents not only pay the bill for city services, but we are also the consumers of those services. Less revenue means that we will have to adjust our expectations. Having resident input in how we shrink our services is going to be extremely important.

In the summer of 2011, the City held focus groups, attended by 45 randomly selected residents, to review our budget (using the Citizen’s Budget Guide) and make recommended cuts.

The City been cutting costs for several years, and this draft Budget continues and builds upon this process of reducing City expenditures.  Many of the group’s recommended cuts were included in the 2012 budget, itemized below.

  1. City health insurance costs are reduced in 2012 despite a 15% increase in insurance premiums. This is accomplished through eliminating health insurance for part-time employees (including City Council members), requiring spouses of employees who have access to affordable health insurance to take it from their own employers, and reducing (but not eliminating) investments in wellness.  Non-union employees will pay 15% of their health insurance premiums in 2012 (instead of 11.5%), and all employees will pay 15% in 2013. Together, these changes in health insurance save $146,500 annually, and more as healthcare costs rise over time.
  2. Additional changes to the City’s benefits—phasing out vacation and sick leave sellback for non-union employees and removing the top rung of the longevity ladder each year for all employees—reduce ongoing expenses by $26,000 in 2012, and will save an additional $5,000 per year as longevity pay is phased out over time.
  3. The City’s discontinuation of its relationship with ICRC in 2012 will generate a net savings of $38,000 because of the new contract costs with SIRE.  SIRE is a documentation management and workflow software program which is part of the solution Council has selected to continue to broadcast City Council meetings over the web.  The City is able to ensure transparency while still reducing expenditures substantially and the document management and workflow features of this software are an excellent investment in technology to improve staff productivity.
  4. The 2012 Budget discontinues a number of programs or activities which will together save $47,000 annually starting in 2012.  This includes ending the print version of the resident newsletter ($12,000), eliminating a neighborhood grant program ($3,000), discontinuing the Rhythm on the River Concert in the Park Series ($9,000), ending the City’s tuition reimbursement program ($13,000) and reducing organizational wide continuous improvement training ($10,000).

Downloads

 

© City of Loveland, Ohio