Like it or not, you're about to pay more taxes and fees thanks to a 5-2 City Council vote on the next City budget. The increases will help maintain existing services and even add some extra cash to the roads fund. The two dissenters, Republicans Adam Hornung and Jon Camp, didn't offer many alternatives, which shows just how little obvious fat remains in the budget.
My point isn't that Hornung and Camp didn't contribute to the process; quite the opposite, in fact. It's just that we're beyond the point where it's easy to point at specific expenditures and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. There were some reasonable options presented -- using rainy day funds, for example -- but most of the alternatives would have required fairly steep sacrifices that most Lincolnites weren't willing to make. It was good for those alternatives to receive a lot of local discussion. This problem won't go away any time soon so we'll need to continue a lot of this talk in the near future. This year we were willing to pay more to support existing services. What about next year and beyond?
You can probably tell that I generally support this year's budget. I'm not pleased about the waste going into the Air Park fire station, but I don't have a good solution to offer. We need to find a solution for next year's budget. You know that libraries are going to be up for discussion again soon so we really need to figure out what we're going to do about that. And add pools to the list. Surely we can find some solutions to make local pools more viable.
What winners and losers did you have in this year's budget?
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I thought they could have been a little more aggressive with the budget. I completed the budget survey and thought there were some areas that, while difficult to cut, could have been reduced or eliminated.
I agree with you, the decisions have only been postponed. These are long-term budget issues that can’t be addressed with tax increases every year.
I wonder how the survey options fared in the final budget. I should have printed out the questions.
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