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rapunzel
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Did council approve the budget???? It looked like it was gonna be 3 against and 5 approve.
The written version is hard to understand by line item per dept.
Most importantly this will not be on ch 17 so the most crucial meeting of the year will not be seen by the average FLINT CITIZEN!!
Go figure! |
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Mon Jun 05, 2006 9:31 pm |
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| Yes, the budget was approved! 5 -4 I believe. |
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Tue Jun 06, 2006 8:04 am |
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Adam
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I did stay for the confirmation of our Enron style budget. I'll try and make sure that next year we can have perhaps our first "traditional" budget in decades. Some cities fund by department. Flint apparently likes to have various funds fund departments. There are at least 3 seperate funds for the police. It looks to me like the police are underfunded by $20 million. I assume that is coming out of the general fund but it could be coming partially from block grants or something. I don't consider the budget that was approved to be complete. It should have showed where each departments funds were coming from. If Flint was a business I don't think our budget would be legal.
Moving forward I hope next year we can have a more traditional budget where funds are geared strictly for departments. For example our police fund is under $4 million yet we will have police spending of about $28 million. Flint likes to fund departments from multiple funds instead of using basic departmental funding. There are about 3 funds that fund the police department but looking through it looks to me like the police are about $20,459,234 undefunded. I assume that comes out of the general fund but that is not marked in the budget. I sent an email to Gonzalez about this issue.
Next time around I will try and make sure Flint gets a more traditional budget like most every other city in America which would be a budget that our average citizen might be able to understand.
The only change made was $200,000 moved from the Ombudsman office to the police department at last nights meeting.
Adam Ford |
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Tue Jun 06, 2006 4:45 pm |
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Josh Freeman
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quote:
Adam schreef:
I did stay for the confirmation of our Enron style budget. I'll try and make sure that next year we can have perhaps our first "traditional" budget in decades. Some cities fund by department. Flint apparently likes to have various funds fund departments.
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What you received at the meeting was a very general overview of the budget... it is much more detailed than that resolution suggests... This City Council approved the budget at a department level... which gives those folks running the department great latitude in how the money is spent.. and much harder for the Council to control the spending.... for example.. if the Council wanted to build a new firestation and put a line item in the budget that stated X number of dollars for a firestation.. I believe that the way they have passed this budget would allow the department head to move that money to another line item, say wages, without Council input... bad move if you ask me... the Council has very little control over projects....JMF
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There are at least 3 seperate funds for the police. It looks to me like the police are underfunded by $20 million. I assume that is coming out of the general fund but it could be coming partially from block grants or something. I don't consider the budget that was approved to be complete. It should have showed where each departments funds were coming from. If Flint was a business I don't think our budget would be legal.
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The police department is the largest expense from the General Fund... but also get money from millage, Block Grants etc... It is not underfunded... JMF
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Moving forward I hope next year we can have a more traditional budget where funds are geared strictly for departments. For example our police fund is under $4 million yet we will have police spending of about $28 million. Flint likes to fund departments from multiple funds instead of using basic departmental funding. There are about 3 funds that fund the police department but looking through it looks to me like the police are about $20,459,234 undefunded. I assume that comes out of the general fund but that is not marked in the budget. I sent an email to Gonzalez about this issue.
Next time around I will try and make sure Flint gets a more traditional budget like most every other city in America which would be a budget that our average citizen might be able to understand.
The only change made was $200,000 moved from the Ombudsman office to the police department at last nights meeting.
Adam Ford
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Wed Jun 07, 2006 7:08 pm |
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Adam
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So you're saying 20 million is most likely coming out of the general fund? If that is the case it seems to me that that should have been somehow indicated in the budget. There were no planned expenditures listed for the general fund in the budget I sw.
I've also looked at other city budgets before and they seemed like the average person could understand them. I'm not convinced you can do that with Flint's especially since the budget failed to even identify where the majority of police funding was coming from. Why can't we have 1 police fund for police like a normal city instead of 4 different funds like Flint? The other more extreme thing you could do is just have one general fund and disperse payments out to departments.
The other issue I had was the huge increase in the mayors budget. I guess department heads are going to become part of the mayors office.
If you diagramed out Flints budget you would see a big itertangled spiderweb. Various funds pay various funds. Even the police fund seems to pay out to other funds. |
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Wed Jun 07, 2006 8:03 pm |
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