CRESTVIEW — City department heads have trimmed some $290,000 off their preliminary budgets, but there still is almost $616,000 to go, City Clerk Betsy Roy says.
“The happy, happy, happy news is the utility fund is balanced,” Roy told Crestview City Council members at a budget workshop last week.
However, the general fund’s deficit is based on the higher tentative millage established as a budgeting threshold. To maintain the existing property tax rate, even more cuts will be necessary.
Salaries, pensions and benefits for the city’s roughly 200 employees comprise a major part of the budget, “and it’s got us strapped,” City Council President Robyn Helt said.
The city cut $137,000 off an earlier budget proposal when the insurance broker negotiated employee health insurance at no increase with Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Finance Director Patti Beebe said.
Helt suggested one way to lower expenses is to ask employees to pay more for health insurance for their family members.
“I cannot ask 22,000 residents of the city of Crestview to provide 50 percent of employees’ spouses and dependents health care,” Helt said. “If they can’t do it for their own families, how can they be expected to do it for the city.”
No council member wanted to raise taxes, something Councilman Thomas Gordon called “hitting low-hanging fruit.”
“When you’re in the grocery line and you have $100 in your pocket and the bill comes to more than that, you start looking to put some things back,” Gordon said. “It’s time to put some things back.”
Crestview Fire Department Capt. Jim Poirrier, president of the firefighters’ union, said his members are eager to help Fire Chief Joe Traylor find savings, including reducing pension costs.
“It is not the intent of the union to drive costs up for the city,” Poirrier said. “The union is here to help, not to hurt.”
Public Works Director Wayne Steele said his department provides the same services at budgets lower than they have been in 10 years, and challenged other department heads to follow suit.
“If I can do it, every dad-burn person in this room can do it,” Steele said. “I have tried to be an example of how to do it, but it’s hard … I challenge everybody to look hard and do what you need to do.”