Raja on the Mt. Lebanon Budget

Commissioner Raja posted a long review of the recent Mt. Lebanon budget process on his blog. Read the whole thing.

A taste:

My article “20/20” in the Mt. Lebanon Magazine (available online at www.joinraja.com) a few months ago highlighted my thoughts on increasing revenue and reducing expenses with a focus on improving efficiencies by 20% (with the objective of keeping the service level the same) and providing a 20% tax cut to the residents.

The millage tax cut of that passed by the Commission was only 1.6% (178K out of $10.575M). The economic conditions of today have had a clear impact on the potential savings. Just as an example, I want to hypothesize how this could have been 20%.
• The net savings from my recommendations (including Commissioner DeIuliis suggestions) with increases in revenue, reductions in expenses and with restoration of key services that were cut was $574.240.
• Increased costs faced by the Municipality were $1,412,700 (based upon the increases in fringe benefits primarily due to employee health insurance ($308,200), increase in pension costs (129,000), increases in refuse collection ($480,500), fuel ($105,000), utilities ($140,000), MRTSA ($94,000) and salt ($56,000) along with a need to increase the undesignated fund balance ($100,000)).
• In my recommendations, in many areas I had chosen to make reductions in the 2009 budget if they were notably increased over actual amounts for 2006 and 2007 (and 2008 year-to-date where appropriate) and maintained a reasonable and justifiable increase in 2009. By being more stringent on the 2009 budget (ex: keeping it more in line with prior year actual amounts), additional savings of $129,587 could have been generated.
The total of all the above items is $2.117 Million which could have provided marginally over a 20% reduction in millage. The economy has had an impact of all sectors including Mt. Lebanon and while we need to adjust to current economic factors, the hypothesis is just to show how a 20% millage tax savings could have been possible.