Untitled Document
Just call him our resident “Mr.
Fix-It.”
Timothy Bramlet became Springfield’s newest
financial adviser after signing on as chairman of the city’s Blue
Ribbon Committee this week. Bramlet — along with a select group of
business, labor, and community leaders — is expected to spend
countless hours between now and early summer evaluating the effects of
increasing police and fire pension obligations and identifying tactics to
lessen the city’s looming financial burden. Due to changes in state pension law and guidelines,
Springfield currently owes nearly $115 million in unfunded police and fire
pensions. The city estimates that this figure will continue to grow. Davlin
previously advised the City Council that the only way to evade debt and
financial crisis would be to raise the property tax for the first time
since 1984 — a measure that aldermen have since avoided. Bramlet is no stranger to Springfield’s fiscal
sorrows. He was previously called on by Mayor Karen Hasara and assigned to
the task of merging the Springfield Park District and the Springfield
Recreation Department. After nearly insurmountable odds and two years of
work, Bramlet recalls, his commission designed a successful framework that
has benefited both city taxpayers and park district patrons. Additionally, Bramlet, the former president of the
Taxpayers’ Federation of Illinois and the current owner of his
namesake legislative and lobbying firm, has headed numerous other financial
projects such as Gov. Jim Edgar’s blue ribbon commission on property
tax reform. He says it was Davlin’s persuasiveness and his own
familiarity with city budget strife that convinced him to get on board with
this latest undertaking. “I had a conversation with the mayor a couple
of months ago, and I told him that the only way to get the politics out of
it would be to put folks from the private sector in there to come up with
solutions,” Bramlet says. “Little did I know that he would come
back and ask me to chair it.”
Bramlet will be joined by up to 11 other committee
members, whose names will be announced by the city later this week. Their
first task will be to “go back to school” and learn everything
there is to know about police and fire pension funds and the city’s
tax structure. After that, Bramlet says, it’s all about brainstorming
different ideas and evolving them into a game plan. Bramlet concedes that the committee will face certain
challenges along the way, especially since it is only the second in the
state after Chicago created for the sole purpose of studying the pension
problem. Not only will the committee members need to be creative, he says,
but they will be pressured by other communities who are also waiting for
answers.
Then there’s the biggest obstacle —
making Springfieldians and their aldermen happy. “The challenge is that there are no easy
answers,” Bramlet says. “No matter what we recommend, hardly
any of it will be popular with either the elected officials or the
taxpayers in the city.”
It’s too late for Bramlet’s solutions to
make a difference in the fiscal year 2009 budget, which must be passed by
March 1. But after considering all viable factors including existing
revenue streams, cuts in services, and new or different taxes, Bramlet
hopes that the committee will develop a long-term plan to assist the
city’s future decisions. “This problem is a much bigger, longer-term
problem, and it demands that we not just make quick decisions to get us
through the next few months,” he says. “We’re going to
try to come up with something that makes economic sense.”
Contact Amanda Robert at arobert@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2008.
