Council gets it right on budget

The News Virginian
Published: May 21, 2008

Payoffs for taxpayers are rare. Waynesboro’s get one starting tonight, and there is sufficient cause for hope that it will be the first of many. In the wearisome but necessary process of approving a budget, city officials will introduce an ordinance, which the council is expected to approve, maintaining the tax rate at 70 cents per $100 of assessed value.
This is precisely what voters had in mind earlier this month when they streamed to the polls in support of a conservative bloc of council candidates led by at-large incumbent Frank Lucente. Looming in the election background was the prospect of a 6-percent tax increase that would have cost the owner a $100,000 home an additional $40 annually, hardly a sum that would spark a bank run but when cast into the mix of other rising costs enough to furrow taxpayers’ brows and propel them to the voting booths.
Extra revenues would have been required to, among other things, cover the cost of $685,000 in stormwater improvements, $107,000 in new cars for the city police department and $72,000 to allow people to make credit card payments online.
Among those items, stormwater is a point of dispute on the council. Both sides concur that work is needed, but differ on particulars, including how to pay for fixes and the extent to which the system’s deficiencies – evinced in the flow of water onto city streets during heavy rains – are attributable to a lack of maintenance or infrastructure.
Vice Mayor Nancy Dowdy and Councilwoman Lorie Smith favor a utility fee, believing infrastructure to be primary in the system’s ills. Lucente and his allies support budgeting stormwater money in the general fund, believing maintenance to be foremost among the system’s deficits.
The product of the latter spending view is in evidence, fee proponents say. The council last year planned to invest $1.2 million in a fledgling stormwater management division funded by fees imposed on property owners. Having rejected that option and included stormwater in the general fund, the council has cut spending by less than half, to $585,000. We suggest this is adequate until the more significant questions about maintenance and system infrastructure are answered definitively, which this newspaper will seek to do in an upcoming stormwater investigation.
On the remaining items ticketed for cuts, the council earlier this week reached consensus with stunning ease. An additional $94,000 was trimmed from the public works and parks and recreation departments. A proposal to add three firefighters was rejected, but the city will get a new fire chief.
Council members met one-on-one over the weekend to review $1.5 million in trims proposed by City Manager Doug Walker. Lucente proposed a set of cuts, while Smith and Dowdy proposed another. The latter duo, which will form the council’s minority when Bruce Allen joins the panel in the summer, even offered a plan that would have reduced the tax rate to 69 cents per $100.
Contrary to visions of gloom purveyed by some of the candidates vanquished May 6, the city looks to be emerging in good health from its first exam since then: the new budget will allow services to remain substantively intact while shielding already strapped taxpayers from increased cost. “We took some stuff away,” Lucente said, “but nothing that’s going to hurt anybody.”
In addition, the politically altered council is demonstrating that its members can function successfully despite their philosophical differences. That task, however small, grew elusive in the waning days of the campaign, during which a deep chill settled within council chambers.
Having acquired clarity from the election regarding constituents’ will, both factions appear to have taken up with zeal and cordiality the pursuit of building a better Waynesboro. With the voters who ordered as much, we say bravo and encore.