City Admits to Overlooking Impact of Cuts Down the Road

In starting the process to address growing concerns with city services, City Manager Dana Foster and the Brighton City Council didn't just blame budget cuts --they blamed themselves.

In Foster's presentation at , he delved deeper into why city services have been receiving flack lately. Foster said cuts made deeper each year for the last three years have started to crop up into the problems the city faces now.

"We've finally now hit the wall," Councilmember Jim Muzzin said. "We're now seeing the effects -- trash cans overflowing, the Mill Pond, potholes not being patched."

Foster said the problems lay in obscure, line-item operating cuts the city has made. He and others have referred to those cuts as the low-hanging fruit, or the easy cuts to make, as opposed to bigger impact cuts dealing with personnel and employee benefits.

"It may be that we haven't talked about some of the more mundane operating line-item cuts we've made along the way and the impacts," he said. He cited the Mill Pond maintenance budget as an example. Budgeted treatments for the pond's algae have dwindled to just twice a year, and the city already used up its first one since the start of this fiscal year on July 1.

"I didn't do more then as I should have then at making sure there was more Council discussion about some of these line-item cuts and the service impact," he said. Foster later said that he and Council went more by the numbers than what the implications would be.

After his presentation, members of the Council also expressed their doubts about not looking deeper into the line-item cuts.

"I don't feel we, the Council, did a good enough job on revisiting them (documents detailing potential service impacts of budget cuts) on where we need to possibly make some cuts," Muzzin said.

The only specific action taken from the discussion was Council's informal permission to continue with Foster's suggested process of looking over past budget documents again to possibly put forth budget amendments that will re-allocate resources to different areas in the budget.

The extent of this process, and how long it'll take before changes will be made, wasn't made clear. Foster called on City Council to come to him and his staff at the Aug. 18 Council meeting with specific requests to be looked at. Foster said he and his staff could then come to the Council with budget amendments for actions during City Council meetings in September.

One of the documents city officials will be reviewing is the Prioritization of Services Matrix, which is a series of charts that rates city services' importance. A PDF of the most current copy of this matrix is included above.

Meanwhile, the city also addressed a few solutions to current problems. Department of Public Services Director Matthew Schindewolf updated the Council on the weed problems at Fairview Cemetery, saying that workers cut down the weeds two weeks ago.

The next step, he said, was to use weed-killers to spray the cemetery in order to keep the grounds weed-free until the next growing season. However, how the weed spray will be acquired or paid for wasn't made clear, and when the program would start wasn't announced either.

As for the Mill Pond, Foster alerted the Council of the cost of adding two more treatments for the pond this year; he estimated around $2,000-3,000 for at least two. No action was taken on that recommendation at the meeting, and Council didn't make clear if it would be taking action in the future.