08-26-13 Common Council Meeting Minutes

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REGULAR MEETING AUGUST 26, 2013 other subjects in them such as the zoo and parks and the AECOM issue. Budget transfers are simply a mid-year correction in the way the numbers appear properly on the page. We are not asking for any more money, all we are trying to do is make sure that the actually expenditures that we have placed in the proper accounts actually have the proper budget dollars show up with them. There are two advantages to this, first of all, in 2013; this allows us to track properly what we actually have in our accounts. When you folks here the question: “Is it in the budget” I get the sense that you are thinking in a macro term: “does South Bend have this in its budget”? If someone asks me as a fiscal officer if it’s in the budget, they are asking me about a 14 digit number and asking me about that specific account and they want to know does that account have money it to pay for the pencil that I need to buy. Those are the adjustments we are trying to cover right now, that’s pretty much it. Yes, some of the numbers are big; some of the adjustments have to be made that are pretty large. I would for one take full responsibility for the capital assets adjustments. I’m the one that did the financial analysis to show that our assets calculations were too low. So we are doing a bunch of adjustments to kick the budget out of capital and put it into the small equipment where it belongs. It doesn’t cost anybody a dime; it’s just a correction to make it look pretty. Now the other advantage, I mentioned in 2013, the advantage in 2014 is we will now have correct numbers to look on as we continue to develop the budget for 2014 and then when we are in 2014 looking back we can correctly see what did we do and how do our budgets compare to that. So again, it’s simply a correction to make everything balance out nicely; it doesn’t cost us a dime. The following individual spoke in opposition to this bill: Jesse Davis, P. O. Box 10205 South Bend, Indiana, I would like to say I’m one who is against taking money and throwing it somewhere and hoping that it lands in the right place, so I want to applaud the Councilmember’s who said hey we want more transparency. I use that word frequently and I have to agree that there is very little transparency on the dollars that move from one account to another. When you are talking about taking money from Century Center fund and moving it somewhere else, the Century Center is losing money every year, so someone is going to be looking at Century Center needs a million dollars and they are taking a quarter of million dollars and moving it from here to here. So I think tracking this money is very important, transparency is very important. We don’t see much of that within the city and we don’t get to see all the numbers that you get to see. So we have to depend on what we can dig up on the internet and maybe happen to get from our Councilmember’s or from this new data site. That is a good site to look up. Councilmember Schey stated that in my old job I worked for IBM and there was this pattern that we saw when companies at the eleventh hour in December when companies had surpluses in their budget, our phones would be ringing off the hook, because departments wanted to spend their money “use it or lose it” was the old saying and I know in my job in sales at IBM I would be working late on New Year’s Eve to make sure that I inked all the deals before the year was over so that all of those dollars that department heads wanted to spend before they lost it to the new year’s budget that we were able to be the beneficiary of that. So now I am on the other side of things and I want to be very responsible and mindful of that type of behavior, I’m not saying that it does or doesn’t happen, from my position on the Council and my position of oversight and good fiscal stewardship, I want to make sure that we are being very responsible with how we budget. Certainly in December if we see another budget transfer bill that comes before us with all of these, I don’t know what department heads might or might not buy in December, trust me in December, I will be looking at that budget transfer bill very closely. But my concern here is that we see substantial amounts of money moving from one account to another account and that could be an indication of departments that might be potentially over budgeting which is something we are going through in preparing the 2014 budget. Then conveniently having these budget surpluses in their accounts mid-year to transfer and move around to cover expenses that were either unforeseen or just maybe something that a particular individual wanted to do and then conveniently found money in an account. My hesitancy in supporting this bill is I do not like how that creates a lack of transparency in our spending patterns. I hope that makes sense and tried to provide some analogies that there in lye’s my concern, not with 34-13 or 35-13 those bills have been very well explained and I will be supporting those bills when they come before us in a couple of minutes. I have some real concerns with 33-13 and you know the budget surpluses and how these funds are moved from one account to another. So that’s my comment. 10