Tacoma’s City Council is set to consider a resolution today calling to delay 100 potential layoffs to the city’s police and fire departments – job cuts that when proposed last week immediately stirred public controversy.
But the proposed 30-day delay to public safety cuts isn’t the only action called for in the measure. If passed, the proposal also would direct interim City Manager Rey Arellano to “have an independent financial review, to be completed within 30 days, of the city’s projected revenues and expenditures for the years 2012-2014.”
The outside financial review is meant to once and for all answer ongoing concerns about the city’s budget projections, said Councilman Jake Fey, the measure’s primary sponsor.
“We’ve heard a lot in testimony from different parties – either they don’t believe (the city’s projections) or they don’t know how we got there,” Fey said. “This is to provide some clarity – clarity for this budget and for (the next one). I think it’s important for the council to have that and for the public to have that.”
The proposed resolution – co-sponsored by Councilmembers Spiro Manthou, Ryan Mello and Victoria Woodards – comes after the city’s rank-and-file police and fire unions sent formal letters to the council, asking it to delay layoffs while public safety labor representatives discuss possible alternatives with the city’s labor negotiator.
In recent weeks, citizens, fire employees and representatives of Tacoma Police Union Local 6 openly have questioned the city’s forecast $31 million shortfall to the 2011-12 general fund. The projected budget gap led Arellano to propose eliminating 167 jobs and making other cuts as part of a strategy to cover about 75 percent of the shortfall by year’s end.
The police union, which is set to restart contract negotiations next week with the city’s labor negotiator, already has hired a forensic accountant to review the city’s budget numbers, Local 6 president Terry Krause said. The council’s call for its own outside review would only provide further assurances, Krause added.
“I think it’s great, if they’re willing to do that,” he said. “It’s a good idea.”
If the council resolution passes, only proposed layoffs to the police and fire departments would be delayed. Potential cuts proposed for other city departments – including laying off 67 nonpublic safety employees, mandating furlough days and making other wage cuts to nonunion city staff and department directors – would proceed toward a Jan. 5 implementation date, city spokesman Rob McNair-Huff said Monday.
Meantime, the outside financial review would be a limited analysis that could be done quickly and cheaply, Fey said.
“It’s got to be something we can do quickly, and I don’t see this being a big contract,” he said. Fey added that the move isn’t about whether the council trusts the city’s financial staff.
“I think we’d benefit having a separate set of eyes looking at it,” he said.
“In a normal noncity manager form of government – Pierce County, for instance – they look separately at the numbers proposed by the executive, right? So, I don’t think it’s anything other than that – just checking, verifying to make sure where we’re at.”
Lewis Kamb: 253-597-8542
lewis.kamb@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/politics
Twitter: @lewiskamb
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