Making a half-percent city sales-tax hike permanent
isn’t going to make or break the city of Springfield, but Mayor Tim
Davlin says that it’s critical to maintaining the status quo, let
alone financing new projects. The council voted in 2003 to increase the sales-tax
rate to 1.5 percent, from 1 percent, on the condition that the tax would
sunset at the end of this year. Now, Davlin has literally pleaded with the
council to keep the increase, worth approximately $8 million a year to the
city’s bottom line, in place. Davlin last week presented his fiscal year 2007
budget to the City Council. The budget proposal assumes that the council
will vote to keep the tax. At $92.9 million, Davlin’s budget is $2.2
million heavier than last year’s because of “unfunded
mandates” in employee benefits. The expected closing of the city
health department next year frees up money for about 40 new police cars and
two new fire rigs. Budget hearings begin tonight, Dec. 1, after the
regular meeting of the city’s public-works committee. On Tuesday, Ward 5 Ald. Joe Bartolomucci said that
holding hearings on the basis of Davlin’s assumptions that the
increase will be made permanent and the health merger will go through would
be “ridiculous and fruitless.”
“It’s like buying a mansion based on
buying a lottery ticket next year,” Bartolomucci says, although he
won’t comment on exactly where cuts should be made. “He’s the mayor,” Bartolomucci
says. “He needs to show some leadership and present a balanced budget
to the city of Springfield. He’s not going to throw out a half-baked
proposal and throw it in our laps and force us to make the hard
choices.”
Ward 3 Ald. Frank Kunz, who is chairman of the
council’s public-works committee, says that he plans to vote to make
the sales-tax rate permanent. As he sees it, the only other way to balance
the budget is to eliminate workers, whose salaries and benefits account for
three-fourths of the mayor’s proposed budget. “There is no big-ticket item or program we can
cut to come up with the money; you’d have to do away with
jobs,” says Kunz, who won’t single out anyone, either. But he
believes that doing so would not likely have council support. “There are a lot of people I’d like to
get rid of, but it’s a moot point because it’s not going to
happen, so there’s no sense dwelling on it,” Kunz says,
“but I have no problem with doing away with jobs that don’t add
to the quality of life in Springfield, jobs that the people of Springfield
would not even notice were gone. “In my experience with living in Springfield
all my life, it seems like whenever they do away with jobs, it’s
always the low people that get it, never the politically connected
people.”
Kunz voted against funding for two mayoral aides:
executive assistant and educational liaison. Together those two positions
draw $93,512 in salary. “Say what you want, but the people are being
served a lot better now than have been over the last year and a
half,” Davlin says, referring to the recent appointment of Jim
Donelan as his executive assistant. “Right now he’s out at the airport at a
meeting while I’m sitting here continuing to have these
meetings.”
Without Donelan there to fill in for the mayor,
Davlin says, “I would have had to just tell those people, ‘No,
I can’t go out to your meeting.’
“You can say the same thing about education
liaison, but she’s [Sheila Stocks-Smith] certainly shown strength in
what she’s been able to do, just in the last few weeks, with the
amount of community support in the programs she’s put on.”
In November, Stocks-Smith organized a forum to
explore the so-called educational achievement gap. “It’s all about priorities, and I think
it’s important to have those kinds of positions filled,” Davlin
says. In addition to this evening’s meeting, hearings
will be held Dec. 8 and 13 and Jan. 10. A Dec. 15 meeting is also
scheduled, just in case it’s needed. The council must vote on a
budget before Feb. 28, the end of the current fiscal year.
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2005.
