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Two Steps Back

This afternoon, the City went another $850,000 into the red on its current fiscal year budget deficit, when it canceled its planned weekly Spring 2011 Friday furloughs. This cancelation puts us another two steps back after the one (OK, half) step forward the furlough plan represented.

The reason for this is two-fold. First, Judge Linda Feinberg ini her capacity as County Assignment Judge, identified “certain legal issues” over the plans to close the city’s Municipal Courts every Friday from April to the end of June. Chiefly, these issues seem to be that the City did not coordinate or clear with Judge Feinberg the plans to close the courts along with the rest f the city’s non-essential services each week, as procedure required. Oops.

Also, the state Civil Service Commission agreed with many who suggested that furloughing Trenton Water Works employees along with other city workers was not a good idea. The state Department of Environmental Protection told the City that regulations require full-time licensed operators to be present at the City’s water filtration plant. And, according to the Civil Service rules, if one area of a department is working, the whole department cannot be furloughed. So, according to Meir Rinde’s Times article, “Canceling furloughs for a few water utility employees would require canceling them for all public works employees, who make up a large part of the city workforce, and would sharply reduce the savings from the furlough plan.”

So now what? Well, we are back down about another million dollars in the city’s budget. Since there is still a lot of confusion about just what the numbers are, and what further combination of cost reductions and tax increases will be necessary to balance the budget by June 30, Council needs to get an accurate update from the City’s number crunchers. Council President Muschal has threatened to have Council issue subpoenas to the Mayor and other associates to get information, but it doesn’t have to come to that.

With the withdrawal of confirmed Business Administrator from his new position even before taking it up, it will fall to the current Acting BA Elaine Adams to continue to shoulder the load of running this year’s budget. She should be ready to appear before Council ASAP to present the full and complete picture of our finances, without any mayoral spin and without – I hope – needing a subpoena.

Beyond that, what can be done to get some cost reductions back on track? Today’s decision to cancel the furloughs may make any meaningful savings in this year from furloughs kind of hard, if not impossible.

But, the furlough plans fell through in large part because closing TWW operations can’t be done. And, as long as TWW is part of Public Works, you can’t furlough Public Works without affecting TWW. Catch-22, right?

Not necessarily!

George T. Dougherty (who is so valuable in his backstage role as Trenton Wise Man he should be called Obi Wan Dougherty!) has written a draft Ordinance, and distributed to Council members, that would reorganize several city Departments. Chiefly, the Department of Inspections would be spun off to Housing and Economic Development.

What would then be left of “Public Works”  – the Water and Sewer Utilities – would be, tada! The Department of Water and Sewer.  All this This re-organization would be needed because the city is limited under state law to 10 Departments and Directors.

This would allow any future plans – God forbid! – for any Furlough (or “Temporary Induced Coma” as I call them, even though it’s not catching on for some strange reason!) Days to carve out TWW and Sewer workers, so these employees paid for by customer fees – AND the entire customer base in Mercer County! – could depend on uninterrupted, professional service and high-quality drinking water.

Mr. Dougherty sent this to Council for their consideration on February 15. Now that the furlough plans – and $850,000 in projected savings – have crashed and burned, maybe it’s time to look at this proposal.

Sound like a good idea? Mention it to your Council people. Have them look at Dougherty’s plan. Let’s try to go one big step ahead in trying to fix our finances.

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