I am responding to moderator's comment: "I attended a 2003 budget workshop and
was shocked to watch the council spend less than two minutes discussing both
the police and fire budget requests. Since neither department was asking for
additional headcount, the councilors opted to grill the city manager over his
request for new headcount in the human resources and planning areas. I left the
workshop wondering "just when does the council conduct oversight of performance
at the department level?"


When I first started attending budget meetings about 10 years ago I
was astounded that the city council seemed to cover over $1 million
an hour on average. And the school committee was even worse. But
what was most interesting is that the city council never really wanted
to spend the time to understand what the school budget was all about.
That $24 million school budget chunk of the city budget that year got
1 hour of city council time.

A number of us learned quite quickly that for all practical purposes
the budget hearings were way too late, way too vague, way too
worthless, and basically a dog and pony show put on by the
administration for the average politician who had no real business
background.

We see today how the school administration is trying to use an axe to
pare down their "surprise" red budget for this year. Just a couple of
line items ... school sports, maintenance, etc. ... just hack away and
let the chips fall where they may.

The school committee should start working now on next year's budget
with more than half of every meeting devoted to a complete review of
the administrative management decisions previously made over the last
20 years.

I would rather spend 100 hours to selectively downsize 100 budget
areas with thoughtful, effective cuts rather than the current answer
of taking 10 minutes to attack a budget with an axe.

Budget should be a year long effort of fine tuning how money is spent
and why. A budget line item may involve administrative decisions well
out of date, policies voted on in error, misunderstood priorities, and
a number of those decisions "That seemed to be the right choice at
that time."

This weird budget philosophy seems to be built into our weak mayor
form of government. Without strong leaders ... what do we expect?