Before Seaside City Manager Craig Malin was hired last December, he took a look at Seaside’s budget for the 2015-16 fiscal year, and was struck by two lines: “… the City Manager is to deliver a presumably-balanced budget for the City Council’s consideration. I have failed to do that at this point, and I am truly sorry for that.”
Malin, who had spent the last 14 years as city administrator for Davenport, Iowa, was unfamiliar with such admissions.
“I’ve never presented an unbalanced budget to council,” he says.
So when Malin had city staff run numbers for the city’s 2016-17 budget, he knew he had a challenge: There were $26.8 million in projected revenues against $27.9 million in projected expenditures, which would leave the city with a $1.1 million budget deficit.
“When I heard it was a million dollars, I said, ‘At least it’s not $5 million,’” Malin says. “I’ve done that before.”
Malin got the city’s department heads together and laid out a strategy: Have every department – except police and fire – cut expenses based on its percentage of the total budget. For example, if a department comprised 10 percent of total expenditures, it would have to come up with cuts greater than 10 percent of $1.1 million.
Among the things he focused on in his own department were winnowing down expenses for consultants, and even office supplies. “How much do the pens cost? How many do we need?” he says.
Just a few weeks later, city staff is now putting the final touches on a balanced budget that will require no personnel to be laid off, and which will slightly increase the budgets for the city’s police and fire departments.
Malin, as well as Deputy City Manager Daphne Hodgson, emphasize that it was a team effort that pulled it off.
“Each department looked carefully at ways they could reduce, without damaging services,” Hodgson says.
To give the city’s finances even more of a cushion, Seaside is also offering a retirement incentive program to any employees who have worked there 10 or more years. To opt in, employees must plan to retire between this July and December; they will receive a one-time payout of 1 percent of their base salary for every year they’ve worked at the city.
The preliminary budget will be presented to City Council May 19, and the opt-in deadline for the retirement program is May 25. Depending on how many employees enroll, Malin says the city could have up to a $250,000 budget surplus this fiscal year, and a $750,000 boost in the next.