ABRAMSON BUDGET AND METRO COUNCIL: Can we do better?

You know each day I am amazed at the folks who write me with information and suggested stories. You guys are the best. Seriously. WIth that in mind after receiving some basic info on other City Council's facing similar budget problems from another anonymous source I decided to check out a suggested comparison to San Diego.

Why would I compare our Louisville to San Diego's setup? Simple really. We are very similar in land size, Louisville-399 sq. miles while San Diego comes in slightly less at 372.1 sq. miles, yet San Diego has more people. 1.266 million versus Louisville's 713,000. San Diego also has some budget problems that compare to ours currently in the neighborhood of $40 million short.

The interesting thing about San Diego and their budget is they actually do quarterly analysis and mid year analysis with these reports available online for public view. http://www.sandiego.gov/fm/pdf/qtr1_report_final_05nov08.pdf

Another interesting tidbit is the San Diego budget report is much smaller than the Louisville one 56 pages vs over 90 for us. That means we have to read more inane junk designed to, in my opinion, wear us out or make us quit reading. Seriously you could go blind looking at it long enough.

LouisvilleKy.gov - Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports - Comprehensive Annual Financial Report

They also are more user friendly than ours.

They also are cutting the extra department heads and unnecessary government jobs from the budget and NOT attacking the public safety people like Abramson is here. Those budgets are exempt. So far anyway. Also, in their budget they allow for the fact that they have to pay a union local for violating the contract and still do not take away from the public safety funding such as Abramson who is now trying to pay his losing firefighter case with a so called "budget shortfall." Though he will not admit to that as San Diego leadership does.

Imagine showing an $84 million surplus from the previous year and now subtract $20 million from this year as a "budget shortfall" it would still add up to $64 million surplus would it not? Then why do we apparently have a shortfall according to the Mayor, and why would we be willing to jeopardize public safety to balance the budget?

Can anyone answer that? I can't.

Or perhaps someone could ask the Mayor these questions sent by another anonymous reader:

"How many people work in Community Relations?

Why do we have a full-time Homeland Security Unit?

Why do we have BOTH Internal Affairs and PSU?

Why both a SWAT team and a Special Response Team?

Why do we waste sworn officers doing administrative tasks like statistics, etc. - and how much training have they had for these tasks?"

I wonder how much we can save by actually streamlining our government services instead of fattening them up for political favors and supporter jobs.

Back to San Diego. What other thing does San Diego do that we do not? They manage their larger population with a paltry 8 Council members compared to our 26. With over 500,000 MORE constituents than we have in Louisville they have only 8 council members. Very interesting I would say.

Check out the numbers for the Louisville Council alone. For each Council member and their 1 LA approximate salary alone comes in at roughly $100,000. This is $2.6 million for just 1 council seat per district! Throw in the matching funds, unemployment compensation etc, this number doubles NOT including the support staff!

Consider the secretaries, the aide pool, and a whole host of other paid employees this number can easily exceed $10 million, in my estimation, for what? Most Council members have primary day jobs so essentially their jobs are part time right? How many of you can claim to make a minimum of $42,750 part time. How many think we need 26 Council members when compared to a similar size City such as San Diego?

How many people does it take to do the job. Before you answer consider this. Most Council persons do not even know what is in the budget, how to read the budget, or where the money goes either. Also consider the history of this Mayor and his financial dealings such as the recent Cordish Group debacle getting railroaded through on rubberstamp party lines though the Council members admitted they did not have time to go through it.

Why is this relevant? The Combined Annual Finance report (CAFR) comes out in early December. Wonder why the timing is now to start trying to whack at the budget and reopen union contracts. Perhaps Abramson is hoping to get concessions to fix what he broke before the report comes out and there are problems? Interesting.

I have been asked by other local bloggers Steve Magruder (Louisville History & Issues :: Topic - Mayor Jer: Time to Open the Books to the Public! - Page 1 of 1),and Brian Tucker (http://valleyreport.blogspot.com/), to join them in an effort to seek transparency from Abramson in his budget. Transparency is a problem I have been fighting for for a few years now so welcome aboard guys. It is great to get some help.

The only problem is while the budget is online , and probably fulfills the "transparency angle," as defined by Abramson, not us, it is lengthy and in some ways hard to read. And do not forget this Mayor does not like transparency so he will not make it easy.

With this in mind I have a challenge for you the reader. Rather than just depend on us bloggers to fight for transparency, believe me I will continue to, I urge you to remember one thing. It is OUR government. We deserve no less than transparency so we have accountability of leadership!

How about each of you call 311 and DEMAND transparency NOW from the Mayor and hold HIM accountable for his failures.

Are you up to the challenge?