City officials agree: no tax rate increase

With that goal in mind, Clearwater officials begin the annual process of adding and subtracting to come up with next year's budget.

By CHRISTINA HEADRICK

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 19, 2000

CLEARWATER -- You could read his lips: City Manager Mike Roberto won't ask commissioners to raise property taxes again this year.

At the city's first special budget workshop Tuesday, city commissioners applauded the plan. They have said they want to avoid a scenario like last year's, when they stuck residents with a 7.6 percent increase in property taxes -- the first such increase in nine years -- and slashed city services.

"We all have the same goal," Commissioner Bob Clark said before the meeting. "I don't want to raise property taxes. There's got to be a multitude of ways to make that happen."

But without a property tax increase, the city's budget is going to face cuts, Tina Wilson, the city's budget director, told commissioners.

Under extremely preliminary projections, the city needs to cut $2.3-million from next year's projected operating budget of $84-million, Wilson reported.

The city's belt was tightened one notch already Tuesday.

Fire Chief Rowland Herald announced to commissioners that he would drop plans to ask for $17-million for new stations and equipment, and he won't request additional millions for 49 new fire employees over five years.

Although a special task force of residents studied the Fire Department and recently compiled the suggested expenditures, Herald said he could live with a much lesser plan:

The fire chief proposed spending $6.2-million on new facilities and equipment over seven years and hiring only 17 new employees.

All the commissioners present seemed a bit surprised. Mayor Brian Aungst was on vacation.

"We had a committee do a report that took them four or five months, and now we've put it on a shelf," Commissioner Ed Hart said pointedly.

Hart said the city should reprioritize other projects to pay for more Fire Department needs or impose a new fire fee to pay for some of the fire task force's proposals.

"I'm going to do what I can to help you," Commissioner J.B. Johnson told the fire chief.

Assistant City Manager Bill Horne tried to explain why the minimal request from the Fire Department was okay.

"Unless you take a meat cleaver out to other parts of the budget, and if there isn't a crisis, and we've said there's no crisis with the department, . . . then that gives you the context of how we approached this," Horne said.

Among the Fire Department's scaled-back requests, Herald proposed, the city would work to allow firefighters to continue to be stationed at a U.S. Coast Guard outpost on Sand Key, cutting the costs of building a new station there.

Northwest Clearwater, where response times are 1.5 minutes longer than officials consider acceptable, would have to wait until 2007 for a new station. There would be no new administration building or major new training facility.

Still, the dollars for even the scaled-back expenditures aren't budgeted so they will have to be squeezed into the city's budget, Wilson said.

Other projects Roberto wants to squeeze into the city's budget include: $3.5-million for a new waterfront amphitheater downtown, $2-million to $4-million for downtown development projects, unspecified amounts for downtown parking garages and as much as $5.5-million for beautification of Cleveland Street.

And, Wilson reported Tuesday, the city faces spending more money for internal computer systems and building renovations.

But Wilson identified about $12-million in unbudgeted pools of money on Tuesday that could be used to pay for new projects.

Roberto told commissioners he thinks the cuts to the city's budget can be made, and new projects paid for, without too much pain.

"We're not going to shut the lights off on the Washington Monument," he said at one point during lively debate.

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