06/11/2024
COUNCIL RECAP (June 10, 2024)
Welcome back to City Council News: term #2. It’s been way too long, compadres. How’ve you been? What’re your gripes? Last year while running for re-election I took a hiatus from synopsizing council meetings to knock doors and I’m pleased to say that in November I was re-elected. Now you’ve got me another 4 years!
So what’s the council been up to? Lots. First—last night we passed the FY25 city budget which begins July 1st. This is always a big lift. The process begins early in the year with department heads presenting their proposed budgets to city administration and finance. If these proposed department budgets were all presented to council the budget would immediately appear wildly unbalanced—departments ask for what they need: additional staff, supplies, equipment. Then the dance begins.
City admin and finance work with department heads to understand the most critical needs in each department, which also have to be balanced against city needs as a whole. After months of these conversations, they present to council a “proposed” budget in early May. Council then has several work sessions to ask questions of department heads, discuss, and ultimately: propose amendments.
There were a lot of amendments this year. Budget amendments have to be adopted by a majority of council (6 votes). Unlike department heads, council members are in the (limited) position to move (some) funding. “Limited” and “some” are key qualifiers because the majority of the city’s budget is locked up into “enterprise funds.” These funds are often accumulated with fees and assessments and must stay within their respective departments. A few examples: street fees, water rates, snow plowing. Council sets rates to break even and there are strict laws prohibiting us from transferring these fees and assessments to any other department.
My gut says part of the reason those laws exist is to prevent councils from, say, robbing the parks department to pay for public safety—which, incidentally, is something the majority voted for last night. Some of council’s amendments built on each other so if you tuned into the middle of our meeting it might’ve seemed confusing what we were up to. Here’s what passed:
1. Several unanimous amendments, including a Budget Analyst for the Finance Department, a $100,000 matching grants program for the parks department, an Impact Fee Study, and $615,000 in matching funds for the Stagecoach Trail.
2. 7 new firefighters. This is funded partly from reducing fire’s overtime budget by $400,000 and by re-allocating $300,000 in entitlement shares from Public Works to Fire. Entitlement shares are not fees or assessments. They’re a lump sum the city receives every year from the state as our “share” of all the major sales taxes the state collects: casinos, alcohol, ma*****na, to***co etc. The city’s share is about $17 million/year and this has been divided the same way between library, MET transit, Public Works, and Public Safety for the last two decades. Council universally expressed a desire to re-examine how this funding is split out in the future.
I supported this amendment because I offered an “amendment to the amendment” (I know) to take these entitlement shares from Public Works and not MET transit, as was originally proposed. Public Works has the ability to request fee or/or assessment increases to cover this $300,000 gap in their funding, which I will certainly support when they come before council to approve these rates in two weeks. Neither the parks department nor MET transit have a tool like this; cutting their budgets just cuts projects. It was also my hope that by supporting 7 firefighters not originally budgeted for it would set the tone for adding no more than what I’d consider a proportionate, ambitious number of police officers not originally budgeted for.
3. Council blew right past that. Chief St. John requested 4 new full-time employees in his budget (and 4 next year and the year after etc). No one questioned the need for this investment. The budget amendment proposed instead added 12 new full-time police employees all this year which concerns me for a number of reasons—it’s very difficult to hire that many new officers all in one year; the chief did not request more than 4 this year; hiring new full-time employees is a permanent commitment and the money has to come from somewhere. Council voted 6-5 on this amendment, with several of us on the nay side advocating for a compromise of 8-9 new police officers (still double what the chief requested!). We lost.
4. The money mostly came in a lump sum from the parks department. $615,000 was cut from the parks budget to fund these positions. This wasn’t “new” park spending; this was existing budget authority. Importantly, that money will not come back next year—people expect to be paid every year it turns out 🙂 — so now parks will be scrambling, yet again, to push off deferred maintenance and reduce capital projects going into the future. Since this money was coming from parks, I floated a compromise of leaving $300,000 in a fund for South Park Pool, but this didn’t get traction.
This is my 5th year on council. I’m slowly becoming one of the “elders” who remembers 2020 when we had to go to the public for a safety levy because the city’s budget (mostly due to public safety) was underwater by several million dollars. It took two levies and several years to climb out of that hole. I supported and advocated in the community for passage of both the 2020 and 2021 public safety levies; together they’ve increased public safety funding by $11.1 million/year. The city has literally added dozens of new positions to police, fire, prosecution, courts, and code enforcement in the 5 years I've been on council. I'm proud of that. Are more needed? Of course.
But take too many bites of the apple all at once and before long we start going backwards—either hacking away even more of the parks budget to cover these salaries, or returning to the community for a levy just to maintain current staff. That worries me.
I’m also beginning to see a widening disconnect between the results our community wants to see related to public safety and the allocation of resources. According to the police’s annual 2023 report, approximately 60%+ of charges BPD arrest people for are “administrative charges”—like failing to appear in court. BPD arrests plenty of people initially, then again, and again. They cleared 10 of the 13 homicides last year and had suspects identified in the remaining 3. There’s been a 12% decrease in aggravated assaults since 2021 and last year showed a 1.3% reduction in violent crime. Numbers are numbers, they don’t reflect how people *feel* about safety; I get that.
I also know adding police officers is the absolute easiest answer to public safety concerns—it’s visible, easy to understand, and broadly supported in Billings. Important, no question, but a comprehensive crime prevention and intervention strategy includes a loooooot more players.
Council adopted the budget around 10pm. Some of the amendments definitely concern me and I’m cranky about the parks department being told to scrape needed projects (like neighborhood playgrounds) to subsidize public safety. But I didn’t win those battles and I live to fight another day. Now that the budget’s behind us, this summer I’m focused on helping with 2 grant applications for the city (we finally have a grant administrator!!), and I’ve asked City Administrator Kukulski to form an ad-hoc committee with staff and council members Gulick, Aspenlieder, and myself to evaluate the design process and vet funding sources for South Park Pool’s replacement. There are some creative paths to funding that give me hope we might be able to move forward with that project sooner rather than later—I promise to keep you posted!
