I guess someone at City Hall is paying attention, after all. City manager Mary Suhm said yesterday that sales tax revenue is falling below projections, "and I'm concerned next month will be more challenging."
Guess she reads the same comptroller numbers I do. And her solution to the mess isn't pretty, which I was afraid of: Cutting library branch hours by one-quarter, reducing street and park maintenance, and paying less attention to what she calls neighborhood nuisance abatement. To the rest of us, that's clearing piles of garbage in vacant lots, draining standing water, eliminating insect- and rodent-infested areas, cutting high weeds and dealing with dilapidated buildings.
The latter is especially crucial, not just to those of us in this part of town, but to Mayor Park Cities' allies south of the Trinity. One of his campaign pledges -- one of his key campaign pledges -- was to deliver city services like neighborhood nuisance abatement to the parts of town that traditionally don't get them. If the budget numbers are as bad as Suhm makes them out to be, I doubt very few high weed areas will be cut. And then what will Leppert's allies -- who stood by him during the Trinity River toll road election and the convention center hotel vote and were crucial to his successes -- do?
And none of this includes Leppert's election promise to hire 200 more cops -- without raising taxes. The mayor was betting on the come, that property values would increase enough to pay for nuisance abatement and cops without raising taxes. Which is more or less what happened in the last couple of budgets.
What if that doesn't happen? Shuttering libraries and swimming pools isn't going to be enough to pay for more cops and more code enforcement. Even scarier? The city's debt load from the 2006 $1.35 billion bond program, which accounted for more than eight percent of last year's budget.
Is the situation as bad as Suhm paints it? As I noted the other day, we need to wait for the final numbers from the Dallas Central Appraisal District. The city is hoping a five percent increase in property tax revenue will save the budget, though the county is expecting just a three percent increase. And Suhm may be engaging in a little Star Trek engineering, where Scottie always made the problem out to be worse than it was so he would look a lot better when he solved it.
But I don't have a good feeling. Sales tax receipts in April were less than they were in April 2007, which means way behind what the budget projected. May is also behind last year's numbers by some $600,000. A five percent increase in property tax revenue would be half of what it was last year. Is that possible, given all the bad news we've had about property values?
Regardless, how did this creep up on the bureaucrats downtown? Hasn't the slowing economy been on everyone's mind since before Christmas? Shouldn't someone have said something in January or February, when they saw that sales tax receipts had been flat since in August? (When the council approved the new budget, incidentally?)
Maybe they did, and maybe I missed it. Or maybe they just kept their fingers crossed, and hoped for the best. Which, if they did, means someone needs to be held accountable.
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