In last night’s meeting, the Mayor and Council continued to spar over the budget. In a continuation of the dispute at last week’s work session, Council members Sesma, Marraffa and Schlichting continued to support the addition of $250,000 to the home ownership assistance program, voting to approve the budget which included this provision. Council members Edens and Alster voted against this version of this budget, insisting, among other things, that the $250,000 funding level is arbitrary and unsupported by a dedicated funding source, and unlikely to be needed in its entirety in FY2008. They also were concerned about the impact of taking these funds out of the contingency budget and that the program they were funding had not yet been fully defined. (*)
While all this might be true, much of it is also true of many other budget line items. The contingency budget, for example, is more or less by definition arbitrary. Projects often need to be funded before they can be fully fleshed out. Many City programs run at a loss, and have no funding sources other than taxes, or are unable to recover all their costs through user fees. They are committing us to an aquatic center which will perpetually run at an operating loss projected to be in the million dollar range. They set aside money in the operating budget to purchase furniture, software and vehicles in future years. In the discussion, it was pointed out — on both sides of the argument — that how much they put (or don’t put) in this line item at this point isn’t all that big a problem, as they can always move it later in the year. This is certainly true; for example, money that was in last year’s CIP for improving West Diamond Avenue was spent on a consultant — the Staubach Company — to help market two City-owned properties in Olde Towne.
Thus, it seems to me that the fiscal standard the dissenters are attempting to apply to the home ownership program just doesn’t make sense in the context of the rest of the budget — which, as I suggested last week, just tells me that the overt argument is little more than a proxy for a covert argument that they don’t want us to know about.
The Mayor, who doesn’t have a vote in these matters, continued to threaten to veto the budget that the Council has now approved on a 3-2 vote. If the Mayor decides to veto this budget, there could easily be a stalemate. The Mayor’s veto will stand unless the Council can muster four votes to override. But with the Council members stubbornly split 3-2, these four votes will be hard to come by. However, if the Mayor vetoes, and the Council doesn’t override, the City will still not have a budget, which has to be in place by July 1 — less than two weeks from now — for the City to continue operations. It is my understanding that the City’s charter does not allow for a continuing resolution. In order to get out of this mess, they will need to have at least three Council members to vote for some new budget. But if the three who have voted for this budget refuse to vote for any budget that does not include the $250,000 for home ownership assistance, and the Mayor continues to insist on vetoing any budget that contains it, then the whole process will just seize up.
Following the public meeting tonight, the Mayor and Council went into executive session to receive legal advice from the City Attorney. It was disclosed that the City Attorney had prepared a “confidential” packet for the Mayor and Council, containing background on what the consequences of a veto might be; I expect that it contained all manner of doom and gloom over what, exactly, they would and wouldn’t be able to do if they had no money to spend. As a simple example, I would expect that they would have to cancel the 4th of July celebration, but at a more basic level it is open to question as to whether they will be able to carry out their public safety obligations, or even turn the lights on in City Hall. Council Member Sesma attempted to begin a conversation about the contents of those confidential packets, suggesting that the public should know what risks we face as a consequence of this standoff. Mr. Sesma asked the question of where facts left off and legal advice began, suggesting that they should at least be able to talk about the facts in open session. However, the City Attorney said that what was in the packets was a legal analysis of the facts, and it was not straightforward to separate the two. She said that during the executive session they could decide what to disclose to the public, and ultimately, I think having made the basic point that the public was not being fully informed here, Mr. Sesma let the matter drop.
The Mayor mentioned that it was his understanding that he had seven days to sign or veto the budget, but that he also understood that time was of the essence. On Thursday night, they had scheduled a joint work session with the Planning Commission to discuss the concept plan for the Olde Towne Youth Center, and to kick off the Kentlands commercial district charrette process. They will be adding to that schedule a special session to have further discussion about the budget, and it is unclear if they will be able to address all three items that evening.
I suggest that all Gaithersburg residents contact the Mayor and City Council in the next day or so to let them know that you expect them to walk away from this brinkmanship and come up with a budget before the deadline, or at least to come clean about what, exactly, they are really arguing about. Personally, I don’t even think it much matters which side of this argument — certainly at least the overt argument — you think is right, and which side you think is wrong. At this point some sort of compromise seems necessary.
