“Am I pleased with the budget? Yes. Am I pleased with the budget? No,” Mayor Paul Soglin said regarding the $275.2 million executive operating budget for 2014 in a press conference Tuesday.
Soglin said at the press conference the budget made the best choices given its constraints. However, he said he is upset the government cannot make all the”appropriate” investments.
The budget reduces the government subsidy for the Overture Center from $1.75 million to $1.45 million. It also included $1.7 million in order to cover employee health insurance. Pay increases, however, for employees are going to be lower than originally proposed. In order to deal with increasing fuel costs, Soglin also pledged $11.85 million to metro transit.
Soglin said the cost of metro transit has significantly increased from 2010 to 2014, which is why more than $11 million was pledged to the agency in the new budget.
“We are faced with a tough choice in regards to continuing metro or curtailing them,” Soglin said. “This is the single largest expenditure in the budget over the four years.”
The operating budget also pledges all $4 million in debt issuance to capital projects in order to alleviate the city’s debt, Soglin said.
Soglin said two significant events occurred in the city during the last several years that affected how the budget was determined in comparison with the 2010 operating budget, which he said he uses as a base year.
The most significant of the two events was the passage in 2011 of legislation that limited collective bargaining for public employees and left the city council with unequal financial responsibilities, Soglin said. Therefore, the city approached the 2014 budget plan with that in mind, he said.
The goal is to have no layoffs, no service cuts and no reduction in pay for city employees, Soglin said. Soglin pledged a 2.1 percent increase in pay to represented workers instead of the original 3 percent.
Soglin said the city council predicted that 2013 would be the most critical year in terms of budgeting during a series of meetings in 2011 and 2012 with bargaining units.
Soglin said he is doing his best to ensure the budget does not cause a structural deficit that will lead into the 2015 budget. Although the budget provides a modest amount of excess reserves, he said he is using them in very select areas, like nonprofits, quality of childcare, health care, transportation, housing, education and job training.
The reserves will also be used for the double set of elections that will occur next year, and they will cost almost two times as much, Soglin said, adding he wants to ensure that every eligible voter has an opportunity to participate and that the reserves will help do this.
While Soglin said the choices made in the budget were the best ones given the circumstances, he said he is displeased with it overall.
“I am not pleased because of the crisis we are in, in state government,” Soglin said. “I am not pleased because we cannot make appropriate investments in human capacity and infrastructure which will clearly pay off for Madison, Dane County and the state of Wisconsin in the coming decades.”
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p>Absolutely everything you need to know about how the government shutdown will work: <a href=”http://t.co/TlJ0Llj5Ge”>http://t.co/TlJ0Llj5Ge</a></p>— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) <a href=”https://twitter.com/ezraklein/statuses/384870389685694464″>October 1, 2013</a></blockquote>
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