Thursday, September 24, 2009
News Atlanta CFO: City won't have extra money to spend
Posted by Scott Henry @ScottTheHenry on Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 5:00 PM
Concerned about Atlanta's precarious financial situation? Of course you are. But these days, concerned parties seem to fall into two camps: those who are worried about whether the city will have enough money to provide basic services and adequate public safety; and those who believe the city budget is managed by sleight-of-hand artists, knuckleheads and crooks.
Recently, the second camp has been getting all the press, thanks to Councilwoman Mary Norwood's now-notorious reference to "Enron-type accounting” during a televised mayoral forum. As previously reported, both Mayor Franklin and Jim Glass, the city's chief financial officer, offered public rebuttals to her comments.
But the still-indignant Glass felt it necessary to write a four-page letter to Council members explaining how the city's formerly screwed-up accounting practices had been reformed since he came on board. If you have any curiousity about the state of the city's financial controls, you'll want to read the letter (PDF). I'm not guaranteering you'll be convinced, but Glass describes the budget improvements in exhaustive detail.
However, the part of the letter that proves of greatest interest is the last bit, in which Glass asserts: "The city will not be able to expand spending in the next few years." He seems to be speaking directly to Norwood and the other mayoral candidates when he writes:
… absent any new sources of revenue in the future, a proposal to increase any public-safety related spending (whether for more officers or higher pay) can only be accomplished through significant cuts in other areas of the City's operation. As I stated repeatedly in budget presentations those areas have already been reduced by 30 percent over the last two years, and I just don't see our ability to further reduce those operations.
In other words, the next time you hear candidates promise to hire more cops, ramp up code enforcement or re-open rec centers, ask them where the money will come from.
Comments (3)
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Pension expense is where the money should come from, since that's where it all went. Glass has not touched that, which is OK since he's new and had his hands full and CFOs in atlanta have no power, but he should quit shilling for Shirley by pretending she's done everything possible on the expense side. She's left it for the next lot to slash pension benefits to a level the taxpayer can afford.
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