2011-01-14 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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And they had every right to as far as I’m concerned. Since I was a part of that machination back in the ‘70s, I could always claim I came to the budget process in a different light. In doing so, we had a way that I think might apply at this particular time in our budget effort here. And that’s have the mayor decide that he assesses each one of the departments and tells each one of the departments to have three different budget submissions by department heads. One in which provides absolutely no increases in revenue resources. Another one, if we had it, what would an increment of 5% mean to your department? Where would you put it? And of course the other side of that house is, what would you do if you had to take a 10% cut today? Now, you can do whatever you want with the figures. You can make those figures be whatever you wish. But the point that we had to provide was I thought a very sound principle. We provide a no increase in resource budget. That is status quo. And then one a little bit higher, and one somewhat lower. What that forced the departments to do particularly in the Pentagon, was to insure that there was a prioritization of effort in each department providing that service across the board. And then allowing the Secretary of Defense and others to do their homework and due diligence to make certain that we were getting the proper bang for the dollar. Believe or not, Reagan’s administration did that very well. I know he doesn’t probably get the credit for it, but his Secretary of the Treasury and the economic people he had working for him at that time were really effective in that. It was one of the first times that the department, the Defense anyway, had looked at a budget in quite that manner. By the way, that allowed a lot of flexibility if there was a windfall somewhere along the line as well as providing reasonable perimeters for constraints that department was under initially in the Reagan administration. And it worked to the department’s benefit later when some of the revenues began to flow in. And there was a different attitude as to how we were to treat defense issues. Now I’m looking at this from a different perspective. But somewhere along the line we have to do better. And we have to make an effort to remember that what we don’t want to do may have to be done here. I’m not advocating we have to cut our budget and thereby make drastic cuts. I’m simply saying that I’m not certain we have the adequate plan available to us in case that opportunity or that eventuality was here on our doorstep. We don’t do that at all. And we tend to react. We’ve got to change that thinking. Again, let me go back. I know it’s the way we’ve always done it before. We need to change that attitude. Number two –or along the same lines. One of the things I’ve noticed, a t least it’s my thinking anyway, and again I take a little page from what we did in the Department of Defense –every so often we had a review of the budget each year. You may not have known that in paper, but believe it or not, it’s a dynamic document. The budget is a planning tool and a dynamic document. It changes. It’s supposed to change. It’s not supposed to be put out there, and that makes the only thing you do for the next year or two we have another rehash of the mayor’s budget and we receive the papers on the first of March. That’s nonsense. That’s an inflexible way of trying to handle a very dynamic issue, the issue of revenue resources and expenditures. I’ve suggested it before. I’ll suggest it again. The budget should be reviewed at least semi-annually, every six months. And maybe in the time that we have now where revenues are tough and we know the economy is probably not going to improve substantially, we do it even on a quarterly basis. I proposed that to Nancy Crawford and others and boy you know,I understand. That’s more work, and it’s more work for us if we’re doing it cooperatively on the council. But quite frankly, we need to do that in these times. The policies that 6