Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

A memo went out today to all of Mayor Pam’s Department Heads and Directors. She clearly expects Tallahassee to enact some sort of property tax reform. Iorio is preparing for the worst. Check these excerpts (I have added bold for emphasis, not the city):

• Your budget must not exceed the exact dollar amount you were allocated in fiscal year 2006/2007. Since it will cost you more to provide the same level of service as the year before, this will mean service cuts and personnel cuts as well.

• Depending on the outcome in Tallahassee, you will likely be asked to prepare a budget that reflects even greater cuts. Possible proposals include an inflation adjusted millage rollback requirement. Proposals could mean losses in the $25-30 million range. Doubling the homestead exemption would have an additional $11 million impact. Obviously, there will be a significant loss of revenue.

• Your reductions cannot be one time in nature. The loss of revenue to our General Fund must be considered permanent; therefore, one-time savings will not help in the long term. Your cuts must reduce your budget on an on-going basis.

• There will be no list of unfunded needs coming from your department this year. We will not be funding any new programs or positions in any departments.

• Effective immediately, there will be a hiring freeze on any vacancies, unless approved by the Chief of Staff.

• We will be reducing or eliminating the amount allocated to every non-profit organization currently funded through the General Fund.

• We are withdrawing our bill to increase the general employees pension from a 1.2% multiplier to a 1.25% multiplier. It has been a goal of this administration to increase the multiplier each year until we have reached the goal of the 1.6% multiplier offered through the Florida Retirement System. However, given the budget constraints we face, this will not be possible.

In the General Fund, it costs an additional $15.5 million just to provide the same level of service
from one year to the next. This money represents the cost of funding the salary, benefits and
pension of our nearly 3,700 General Fund workforce (this does not include Enterprise Fund
employees). Since approximately 80% of our budget is personnel, this zero growth approach
will mean reductions in the total number of employees.

I urge every department/division head in this organization to scrutinize your budgets for all ways
to save monies. Look at different ways to do business, eliminate activities that are not absolutely
essential to our mission and make the cuts lasting. Any savings made in fiscal year 2007 will
help the fiscal year 2008 impacts.

Wait - is the city currently spending monies on non-essential services? Also, note the hiring freeze in effect immediately. Of course, Mayor Pam hired her new Transit Manager (at $95K/year) just yesterday! What a lucky coincidence.

Read Mayor Pam’s entire memo on TampaGold.com