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To prepare for a looming budget crunch, Fort Wayne employees will not receive a pay raise for the first time in years, but no city layoffs were necessary.
The Fort Wayne City Council voted 7-2 Tuesday to approve the city’s budget for 2009. The council approved $109,219 in cuts in addition to the $2.4 million trimmed last month to give Mayor Tom Henry a $178 million spending plan. The biggest chunk of the savings was $1.4 million from eliminating 1.5 percent pay increases for city employees.
Council members Mitch Harper, R-4th, and Liz Brown, R-at large, voted against the budget. Council members Tom Smith, R-1st, Karen Goldner, D-2nd, Tom Didier, R-3rd, Tim Pape, D-5th, Glynn Hines, D-6th, Marty Bender, R-at large and John Shoaff, D-at large, supported the budget.
Controller Pat Roller tried to revisit the council’s decision after hours of discussion on the budget but was thwarted by Smith, who led the budget discussion as finance committee chairman and did not let Roller even mention what she wanted the council to reconsider.
No member of the council objected to Roller’s being turned away. City staff said after the meeting Roller was going to ask for raises to be reinstated.
The council did restore a public information officer to Henry’s office. The position was cut last month, but a 6-3 vote restored to the city budget the $54,700 the position requires. It was the only position eliminated from the budget.
The Tuesday meeting was an extension of the council’s original budget meeting. It was held over to allow Brown more time to examine the budget for cuts.
She proposed more than $7 million in cuts to the city, but only a $109,219 cut to the Community Development department was approved. Many of her original cuts were duplicates to previous cuts, part of union contracts or not part of the city’s property tax budget.
An attempt was made to short-circuit debate on Brown’s budget cuts. Shoaff started an effort to vote on the cuts as one package, which likely would have meant immediate failure for Brown’s proposal. The attempt was defeated because council members Brown, Harper and Didier opposed it, leading to a protracted discussion on the cuts.
Goldner criticized the cuts, saying Brown didn’t know what many of them were or how they would affect city services, calling one “insulting” to city employees.
“We’re being asked to cut things we don’t know what the ramification is, to save a few thousand dollars,” she said.
Goldner and the three other Democrats on the council opposed every cut proposed by Brown.
Bender was the lone Republican to vote against numerous budget-cut proposals. After the meeting, he said he agreed with many of Brown’s cuts, but because they were lumped by department, he couldn’t support them. He supported the cuts to community development because he agreed with every one of the department’s cuts.
Rebecca Karcher, spokeswoman for Henry, said she expects the mayor to sign the budget.
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