Verona Council Crunches Numbers

More than a dozen Verona residents filed into on Monday evening for a public meeting of the Verona Borough Council’s finance committee.

For upwards of three hours, council members, borough manager Bonnie Conway and the audience engaged in an open discussion of the borough’s reopened 2012 budget and reviewed a four-page spreadsheet comparing numerous budget line-items for the 2008 through 2012 fiscal years.

Here’s a summary of some of the key points from the meeting:

Council Debates Percent and Precedent

One of the most heavily discussed items was Conway’s proposed pay raise. According to the spreadsheet, her salary for 2011 was $27,040. Her proposed 2012 salary of $33,280 represents a .

Though everyone present agreed that a raise was called for, the rate of Conway’s raise was contended by Councilwoman Sandy Drabicki-Bell, finance committee chair Rhoda Gemellas-Worf and several residents, all of whom said that they felt the rate was excessive.

Gemellas-Worf said that the rate of raises should be consistent across the borough, granting both union and nonunion personnel the same rate of increase.

For example, contracted police employees get an annual pay increase of approximately 3 percent. Gemellas-Worf said that this same standard also should be applied to nonunion borough positions such as Conway’s.

Councilwoman Peggy Suchevich pointed out that Conway has not received a raise since 2009.

As per why she did not receive a raise since that time, Conway said she didn’t ask for one out of deference to the tight financial situations the borough faced in those years.

Suchevich said that Conway’s raise was warranted to compensate for the years she went without a salary increase. Gemellas-Worf agreed that a higher rate was called for, but stressed that the proposed 22 percent raise would still be excessive according to a 3 percent per annum standard.

Even if investment interest is considered when adding together the rates for the years Conway didn’t get a raise, it still doesn’t add up to 22 percent, Gemellas-Worf noted.

Another issue raised by Conway’s proposed raise is whether it would set an unfavorable precedent for future negotiations with union employees, like the police. Numerous residents were concerned that union reps would cite Conway’s 2012 rate as a bargaining chip to beef up contracted-for per annum rates.

Borough Mayor David Ricupero joined residents in this concern and said he thinks it is necessary for borough solicitor Craig Alexander to take a “legal look” at the potential precedential effect of the proposed raise prior to council’s next regular meeting, at which time council hopes to reapprove the 2012 budget.

Council Needs to Revise and Revisit

The spreadsheet distributed at the meeting was prepared by Drabicki-Bell, who advised those present at the meeting that the document was not comprehensive. It took her six hours to prepare it, she said, and she didn’t have time to get to every item in the budget.

But she did manage to get to around 40 income items and 50 expense items, which included projected figures for 2012 alongside figures from prior budget projections, year-end statements and other methods of accounting.

Because a preliminary version of the budget showed a and the revised budget showed a surplus of more than $41,000, council thoroughly examined the spreadsheet to better determine and explain how the budget balanced.

From the largest income items to the smallest expenses, every item on the spreadsheet was discussed in great detail, with the audience asking questions and making suggestions in many instances.

Councilman Tony Futules summarized the goal of the discussion by saying, “The point of the budget is to balance what comes in against what goes out, so that we can pass the budget and people can get paid."

Futules commented that earlier budget projections were inaccurate, both in deficit and in surplus, because final figures were either not available or inexact when included.

For example, a total of $22,000 in payroll expenses ($10,000 for overtime patrolman and $12,000 for court/magistrate personnel) was not included in the revised version of the budget, and other payroll expenses were underestimated because of the convoluted way for which they had previously been accounted.

What’s more, Futules said that certain income items were merely “washes” that were not correctly tabulated in the revised budget. Conway described a “wash” as an instance where revenue comes in and goes back out immediately, or comes in solely for the purpose of reimbursing an expense the borough already paid.

The most accessible example of a wash, Futules said, is the Firemen’s Relief grant, which is considered borough revenue as it is paid to the borough from the state. That revenue, however, is paid out in totum to the firemen, balancing the income and expense completely.

Revenue from delinquent sewage is also an example of a wash, albeit one the current version of the budget neglects to debit. An excess of $50,000 is included as revenue—but it is merely a reimbursement for what the borough pays out to ALCOSAN over the course of the year.

The budget, however, does not list this expense and therefore needs to be revised, said Gemellas-Worf.

Words like “revised” and “updated” were tossed around consistently throughout the meeting, and while each item was discussed in its own right, the cumulative consensus was that the budget needs to be reworked before reapproval.

Gaps need to be filled. Wash expenses need to be added. Projected sums need to be increased or decreased on various lines. Typos need to be corrected. And, Gemellas-Worf said, this is exactly what council plans to do before its next meeting.

A Call for Clarity

Just as the budget needs to be revised because of missing figures, unbalanced washes and incorrect totaled sums of monies, so too do the methods by which the budget is computed and documented.

Councilman Dom Conte said that Conway and Drabicki-Bell are shopping around for a computer software program that handles budget calculation and accounting.

Conway is currently compiling a wish list of what the ideal program would do, which she will later share with a tech expert to aid in program selection. Conway anticipates that she’ll get the program sometime this year, in time to be trained for its use in drafting the 2013 budget.

The overall sentiment of council members was that they, too, look forward to the new program, as it promises to yield both greater ease of administration by management and a more accurate and apparent picture of the budget for purposes of public scrutiny.