Deena Winter: Council tries to lessen property owners' pain

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Monday’s hearing on the municipal budget was not fun for City Council members, but today’s council meeting could be worse.

Today they vote on changes to the mayor’s budget, with a goal of making enough budget cuts to avoid contributing to higher property tax bills in Lincoln.

The City Council’s decisions have much less impact on your property tax bill than the school board’s, but their budget seems to always attract more attention, and ire, from the public.

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The school district gets 63 cents of every dollar collected in property taxes in Lincoln, but the City Council budget hearing brought out a crowd on Monday. The city only gets 15 cents of every dollar, followed closely by the county at 14.

When people want to complain about their property taxes, they tend to call their City Council member. And so today the council will do what it can to pass a budget that lessens the pain for property owners.

The council would have to cut nearly $4 million out of Seng’s $131 million budget in order to lower its tax rate enough to nullify the effect of higher property values resulting from the county’s recent revaluation.

The city tax levy is now 30.1 cents for every $100 of property value. That would have to be reduced to 27.25 cents in order to offset the effect of increased property values.

City Councilwoman Annette McRoy said she and other council members plan to propose nearly $1.5 million in budget adjustments today. When combined with $898,000 in cuts the council has previously approved, that would lower the property tax rate to about 28 cents, by city budget officer Steve Hubka’s estimates.

McRoy said some of the cuts the council previously considered — and rejected — could be back on the table today.

She declined to elaborate, but Councilman Ken Svoboda said he was told by other council members that they’re looking at using about a million in the city’s carryover funds. Rather than take a “use it or lose it” approach, the city allows departments to re-appropriate those unspent dollars on one-time needs.

Combined, city departments have built up between $1.5 and $2 million in carryover dollars.

Svoboda said departments are essentially rewarded for finding efficiencies by being allowed to use the money for, say, equipment.

The other proposal, Svoboda said, is to use all of the $912,000 that the city will be getting from Aquila during the 2006-2007 fiscal year, rather than spread it over two years as the mayor’s budget proposes. The money is for under-collecting franchise fees, Hubka said.

Svoboda said if those ideas don’t fly, his last resort would be to direct the administration to make enough cuts to Seng’s budget to soften the impact of the higher property values to about 6 percent.

Councilman Jon Camp said he would prefer to direct certain departments to cut a certain amount of money from their budget.

The man behind the curtain

The city’s budget officer, Steve Hubka, walks a fine line every year at budgeting time.

He works with the mayor to put a mammoth budget together, and answers budget questions from the City Council as they decide what changes they want to make to Seng’s plan.

And throughout the months-long budget-writing process, he tries to forget he’s one of the 2,000 city employees who will be affected by their decisions.

“I try to keep my own personal opinions out of it as much as possible, otherwise I’d drive myself crazy,” Hubka said.

He tries to make City Council members feel comfortable talking to him about budget issues, but said he’s not going to undermine the mayor’s budget. He works for the finance director, who is appointed by the mayor, so that’s where his allegiance lies.

After years of working with mayors to put together budgets, Hubka has concluded that regardless of who is in the office, Democrat or Republican, they all pretty much make similar decisions, based on what they think is best for the city given the resources it has to work with.

And while Hubka normally is a stick-to-the-facts type of guy, on  Monday, after giving the council a short budget summary, he departed from his usual stoic stance and told the council some city employees were afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation. He basically asked the council to assure city employees that nobody would be punished for speaking out.

City Council Chairwoman Patte Newman quickly gave some sort of assurance, and began the hearing.

Many city employees spoke up — some of them boldly questioning the ethics and motivation behind certain council cuts. One of them was Hubka’s wife, Teri. She accused the council of being uninterested in others’ opinions besides that of the increasingly politically active watchdog, Lincoln Independent Business Association.

Hubka was out of town Sunday and when he returned late that night, he saw his wife’s written testimony on the kitchen table.

“I didn’t want to read it,” he said. “I didn’t want to have any input on what she said. I watched it on TV like everyone else.”

He had a pretty good idea what to expect, however, from “visiting with her around the house.”

“I was surprised how long it was,” he said of her speech. “She could write editorials for the paper.”

Was he nervous after hearing her no-holds-barred speech? Nope.

“She’s entitled to her opinions on everything,” he said.

Council hires its own legal help

In recent weeks the City Council decided to hire not one, but two, lawyers to look into the legality of trimming city employee retirement benefits.

The lawyers’ answer pretty much mirrored that of the city’s personnel director, Don Taute, who is also an attorney.

Council Chairwoman Patte Newman said the council sought outside counsel not because it didn’t trust Taute’s advice, but to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

So how much did that cost the city? The final bill isn’t in yet, but early estimates are in the $5,000 range. The money will come out of the council’s budget.

The council also hired outside counsel to protect its interest in regard to a housing lawsuit against the city.

Quote of the week

“The council will take it.” — Councilman Dan Marvin’s response when a StarTran bus driver interrupted the council’s budget hearing Monday, about halfway through the nearly five-hour hearing, to ask whether anyone else needed a ride home on the handicapped accessible van.

Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.