For you folks out there on BudComms how many of the departments, Municipal or School District, have revolving funds? Yeah, a bit wonkier than my normal Tales from the Budcomm (TftBC) posts but this is important. What’s a revolving fund and why am I writing about it?
They often go unnoticed and grow FAR larger than their original purpose when first established.
In our hamlet, I complained about how much some of our Park & Rec’s programs were costing (like $200 per participant). The “good ole boys/quality of lifers” think of it as a water tank that lets water in and lets water out but without knowing (most of the time) how much was in the tank. Its purpose was to act as a buffer: if not enough was charged for one program, the idea was to use the overages from others to make up the difference. While that sounds ok on the surface, we ended up with a problem.
Like when I came back onto the BudComm two years ago, what should have been, at BEST, $10-$20,000, had ballooned to $134,000. ONE HUNDRED THIRTY FREAKING FOUR THOUSAND BUCKEROONEES. That’s a whole lotta overages, and not a whole lotta underages. Needless to say, when the Parks & Recs subcommittee reported in, I simply asked: “how much is now in the fund?” Pretty much, everyone else went “huh?” including the subcommittee (and I’ll give them a pass being relatively new and perhaps didn’t know about it). This leads to different questions but those will be for another day.
And now, two years later and having bought a new pickup for the department (instead of doing a hand-me-down refurb), it sat at $100,000. So I lit into it in no small matter starting with WHY it was created and how it had grown. This was not a partisan issue – there just shouldn’t be all that much money there even AFTER I pointed it out.
So I put up a motion that zeroed out three line items – ones that had to do with actual programs and instructions for kids. And pointed out a personal anecdote that the Grandson had taken part in the offered swim lessons at the beach where I noticed that the three classes of kids his age were lacking for stuff across the classes (e.g., life vests in order to take them out to the raft that was in deeper water and other swim toys / equipment). Smaller stuff – and not large equipment. Oriented towards programs that require fees.
I noted that NO progress had taken place in reducing the amount in that fund. I made it clear that I wanted monies from that fund to replace those zeroed-out lines. I also charged the other BudComm members that this was a first to take this fund down, over the next few years, to a “reasonable” level. This should be seen as a start of a downward slope and not a one-off.
I was surprised – every member voted in agreement.
Scott Dunn, the Town Administrator asked for a continuance for the action to have time to go over the P&R Director’s budget to use a “scalpel” instead of my war hammer (my words, not his). I agreed to it but with “expediency.”
We put off the final vote contingent on what was presented.
And then there was an email exchanged in which Scott Dunn may have overplayed his hand a bit but that will come in my next TftBC post. I also have to remember to tell the recording secretary to put those email exchanges into the formal minutes – RSA 91:A and all that.
Neat and proper, open and transparent, and Following the Rule of Law dontchaknow!
