The Judge Report - July 1st, 2009

Ever since the State Comptroller's Office issued its sharp rebuke of Amsterdam's budgets and the budget process, everyone involved has been running for cover and pointing fingers and casting aspersions. And/or it seems that it was no one's fault. None of them were in charge.

No kidding.

Now, those of you who used to listen to Judge and Michael Radio back in its hey-day (i.e before this week) may recall that we had been warning for months that there were things drastically wrong with the budget process (BTW, we know something about the budget process. We wrote it). First, the preliminary budget, prepared by the department heads and compiled by the Controller, was late. And it was jump-off-the-page wrong in many respects. Michael particularly went through it and found all kinds of mistakes, including double-entry of salaries and such.

The mayor, as chairman of the budget review board, then took a rather lackadaisical approach to scheduling budget review sessions, which must have met with the approval of the common council and controller, since none of them seemed particularly anxious to get into the details, even though this is the most important thing they do all year.

Then, when the process is finally coming toward a conclusion, suddenly it is announced that the figures they were using were all wrong. A self-appointed subcommittee of the mayor, controller and former controller (now Third Ward Alderman) Kim Brumley then met in secret and came up with a whole new set of figures, apparently dictated by Ms. Brumley, who has a long history of producing phony budgets. [NOTE TO SELF: Ask Gina if Brumley helps prepare the School District budget too].

Remarkably, some of the same errors Michael had noticed still survived. They then had a couple more sessions of the whole board, essentially reviewing nothing, and proceeded to la-de-da delay yet some more, held the public hearing far later than required under the City Charter (though they could have easily scheduled it properly all along) and then adopted the final budget very late but not without making some last minute score-settling provisions which were never open to public comment.

Read the OSC letter linked above for the details of the farce.

Now, the guns are all pointed inward. The Chairman of the Board, Mayor Thane, at least in private, blames everything on the Controller. She wants to hire a guy from the state who for years has been saying that Amsterdam doesn't tax enough (which should show by itself where he ranks on the wizard scale) for $2,500 a month to essentially do the Controller's job. Bear in mind that city officials have been taking advice from this guy for the last year and a half and obviously haven't learned anything at all.

But Thane, Brumley and Corporation Counsel Decusatis are eager to overthrow the taxing limits placed on our government by the voters of the city, and will use the current self-induced crisis to push for it. Decusatis even thinks the voters should not have a say in the matter.

Here's the real problem: for too long, way too long, our city budgets have been a complete joke. They bear no relation to reality or anything else. They are promptly ignored. The Common Council, Controller and Mayor routinely disregard the account limits and approve spending and audits vastly in excess of the line items adopted. They draw on unallocated fund balance as though it were a big pot of money sitting in a closet, a super contingency account. Only after the fiscal year ends do they bother doing reconciliations. In other words, the budget is no restraint on their spending whatsoever.

It is fortunate that some department heads, such as Mike Ryba at Water Distribution and Fire Chief Rich Liberti (I mean no exclusions here) scrupulously watch over their own accounts, because otherwise there is no oversight anywhere, even though required by state law and the city charter.

The Mayor must manage. The Controller must manage. The Common Council must review every audit carefully and deny approval of payments where there is no line item balance (and they must be given accurate figures). The Brumley practice of making unauthorized transfers between funds and allocating payments out of the wrong funds must stop if it has continued.

It is not the fault of the County of Montgomery that no one in City Hall seems to know how to use a computer to analyze where we are at any given time.

It is not the fault of some cruel fate.

And if you want to place ultimate blame, I guess you shouldn't even blame the incompetent elected officials sent there to solve these problems.

As the poet said, The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves
that we are underlings.