Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 6, 1993 TAG: 9305060469
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-16 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: TAKING THE CANDY LENGTH: Medium
Perhaps City Council has made itself look good - the taxpayers' friend. Certainly, by agreeing Wednesday to delay the tax cut until the second half of the fiscal year that begins July 1, and by upping revenue projections from other sources, it has avoided some immediate fiscal consequences.
Yet there are costs and risks for the future, in a city already too much in the habit of deferring needed spending.
Basically, council has approved City Manager Robert Herbert's proposed budget with small variations, introduced presumably to demonstrate council members' independent authority and desire to serve constituents. In all, the 1993-94 budget agreed to Wednesday is only $138,000 less than the $129.7 million budget Herbert proposed two weeks ago.
That is a difference, as Mayor David Bowers observed, of only a tenth of a percent. Yet a shift here and a shift there enabled council to add $62,000 for the schools from what Herbert had proposed; to increase the appropriation for the Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership by $48,000; and to raise from $22,000 to $24,000 the minimum income for elderly homeowners to qualify for real-estate tax freeze. Not a lot of extra spending for council to be seen as champions of education, the economy and the elderly.
And if these causes are worthy, so are taxpayers' interests. Assessed values have been rising. A tax cut is to be cheered - if the city can afford it. The question in this case is whether the city can afford it.
Deferral of the cut until Jan. 1 means $282,000 rather than $564,000 will be lost in city revenues during 1993-94. Given the relative austerity of Herbert's budget in the first place, that's better than trying to implement the tax cut immediately. But in future years, of course, the whole amount will be forgone. What seems manageable now may seem less so then, and the loss will continue year after year.
Another red flag is the use of higher revenue estimates - in all, $200,000 more in the utility, personal-property and meals taxes than projected by the city manager.
True, Roanoke revenues historically have turned out to be 1 or 2 percent more than projected in city managers' budgets. But as noted by Vice Mayor Beverly Fitzpatrick, who voted against the tax cut, economic uncertainty and job losses in the Roanoke region (many of which have yet to kick in) could make this a year in which even the city manager's modest revenue-growth projections prove high.
By inflating the revenue estimates, council has reduced not only its margin for soothsaying error but also whatever unbudgeted surplus may exist near the end of the fiscal year. Typically, this money is used for discretionary spending such as street paving.
Such maintenance spending is discretionary, however, only in the sense that it can be juggled from year to year according to temporary conditions. Over time, failure to maintain not only streets but also buildings, sidewalks, parks and the like increases rather than reduces costs. In some of those areas - tree replacement in city parks, for example - the city has been slipping behind for years.
Nor is slippage confined to physical assets. City schoolteachers, for instance, note that their salaries have slipped in comparison both to inflation and to teacher pay in neighboring Salem and Roanoke County.
Council, even while dropping the tax rate by 2 cents, managed to keep Herbert's budget more or less intact. But that budget contained no new or significantly expanded programs in the first place - whether for Explore Park or community policing, drug treatment or poverty-fighting. In assessing the affordability of the cut, what the city wasn't doing already is also part of the equation.
by CNB