By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
Seattle Parks Finance Director Carol Everson would have rather been almost anywhere else than in front of the Parks Board last night downtown, presenting a grim look ahead.
“I wish I weren’t here talking about this,” she grimaced from the podium at one point.
But talking is essential – not just to plan ahead for possible midyear cuts this year and all-but-certain cuts for the next two years, but to make sure you understand what Parks is facing, and what might eventually be requested to minimize the misery – maybe even the formation of a Metropolitan Park District (explained here) taxing authority.
Before the board meeting, we met briefly with the West Seattleites who are chair and vice chair of the board, Jackie Ramels and Neal Adams, and Superintendent Tim Gallagher.
Their message: If you care about city park services, please listen up and pay attention, because whatever is done to bridge the budget gap, it will affect the services delivered to you. And that was hammered home again during Everson’s briefing.
Part of the problem is good news with an underside of bad news.
That good news is the fact that Seattle voters have said “yes” to park levies, time and time again.
The bad news – that means new money for new park facilities and features, but no new money to run and take care of them, and the department already has a huge backlog – at the pace it gets money (from a section of the budget called the Cumulative Reserve Subfund) for maintenance, Everson told the board, it would take 20 years to catch up on just what’s on the list now, $200 million in needs, and $20 million per biennium coming in from that subfund.
Add to that the Parks and Green Spaces Levy projects that have been and are being built – and fast, since the department “frontloaded” levy work last year, moving quickly to build projects in a positive bidding climate – and Everson said those additions alone will require more than $2 million extra for operations and maintenance: “The list just keeps getting longer.” Even programs that include heavy volunteer involvement, like the Green Seattle Partnership for forest restoration – the subject of a glowing presentation just before the budget briefing – come with an operations/maintenance cost; for GSP, that’s projected at more than $1 million/year.
Superintendent Gallagher and deputy superintendent Christopher Williams warned that this means that the upcoming review of the levy-funded Opportunity Fund proposals – with at least 150 to consider – inevitably will include consideration of how maintenance-intensive the proposed projects are. And if the budget gloom doesn’t lift, they added, it could mean a delay in construction of some projects further down the line – though they acknowledged to us after the meeting, that would be a policy requiring elected leaders’ buy-in.
But we’re getting ahead of the main story. Everson kicked off her presentation with context: The city’s $10 million general-fund shortfall this year, $50 million projected in 2011-2012. That’s the budget section from which Parks derives two-thirds of its money, she noted – for this year, $84 million of a $130 million operating budget.
From there, the crystal ball gets murky, she said. Right now, city budget bosses are revising their forecast, and departments are waiting to see if it will be “better or worse,” and whether they will be required to take midyear cuts. If so, they could be dramatic and immediate, according to Everson, because the nature of Parks’ business – and our climate – means higher summertime spending, less to cut from later in the year.
She pointed to an “anticipated budget-drivers table” for 2011-2012. If the department gets the same amount of money from the city General Fund, that still will leave Parks short, let alone if their GF allocation is cut – holding the line would mean a cut next year of up to $6 million, a five percent GF reduction would mean $4 million more.
And some other money sources are vanishing, such as the last dollars from the Pro Parks Levy. Meantime, operations/maintenance for new parks/facilities isn’t the only category that’ll need more money – a 2 percent salary increase for Parks workers will cost $1.4 million next year for starters. Some facilities that have been closed for construction, like Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, will reopen, requiring operating expenses to resume. Wading pools that were closed last year will reopen this year.
Result of all that: They are working with scenarios to see how Parks would deal with having to cut $10 million – which, Everson said, would include the equivalent of 120 full-time employees. “That would be truly significant for us,” she summarized.
Both in her presentation, and in the conversation we had before the meeting with Gallagher, Ramels and Adams, it was stressed that Parks already has cut “the fat,” with a $5 million reduction this year. Gallagher says even the mayor has pointed out that Parks is the only department with fewer managers now than it had in 2002 – even though, he notes, in that time, because of levies, the city has added 130 new acres of parkland, 42 new parks, and a quarter-million square feet of community-center space.
So what are they doing to brace for the possibility – the likelihood – of budget-slashing?
“Reductions of this magnitude will have service-level magnitude,” warned Everson, mentioning “a long list of possibilities” to total the aforementioned possibility of $10 million/120 full-time-equivalent in cuts. “There are facilities that (would be) closed” – maybe permanently, or, she suggested, maybe “rolling closures.” Coming into play here, a phrase we’ve heard a lot in some preliminary budget shots across the bow, even before last night’s briefing – “getting out of certain lines of business.” (A “line of business” would mean a type of service Parks provides, like aquatics, Environmental Learning Centers, etc.) A “gap analysis” also was mentioned, analyzing Parks facilities to see if there are areas where, for example, two community centers overlap, enabling evaluation of whether both are really needed.
What would be off the table, or close to it? The services listed as those “we need to protect” included “open, free parks; community centers; late-night programs; services to low-income people.” To the latter point, while one option listed as a way to cope with a budget gap was to “substantially raise fees and charges,” board chair Ramels said that would be infeasible. “So we really only have two options,” she said – major cuts, and/or what Everson declared as “the third way” – “Find a new source of dedicated revenue.”
That, in Ramels’ view, could open the door to considering creation of a Metropolitan Park District. (For example, that’s how Tacoma runs its parks.) She said it was discussed briefly in the late ’90s, giving way instead to the now-expired Prop Parks Levy. The board is requesting a briefing on the legalities and procedures involved in seeking an MPD, possibly from city attorney Pete Holmes, for a future meeting.
In the meantime, superintendent Gallagher said he’s asked his team to develop four more budget-cut scenarios, in addition to the one that already has been presented (again, it has not been released publicly). He sought to deflect rumors that have been circulating already regarding what’s most likely to be on the chopping block: “Whatever rumor mill anyone hears about ‘(a particular) facility is going to close’ is just a rumor,” he insisted, adding that by the time all possible scenarios are drawn up, “everybody in every facility in every sort of line of business will be on some sort of reduction list – including me. We have to look at a lot of options.”
That review, he stressed, has been under way since December 2007, not long after he took over Parks; at that time, he noted, he’d “asked everyone for a 10 percent budget reduction .. We have been able to weather the storm (so far) because we have made a lot of efficiency and structural changes in the past few years that have saved money. But we’re now at the point where there’s not much left (to cut).”
All the same, they may have to pick up the ax soon, with the possibility of a midyear cut to get 2010 in balance – “If we had to cut (more than a million dollars) midyear,” said deputy superintendent Williams, “we could experience big cuts this summer.”
Here’s the timeline that was explained:
They expect to find out in early April if immediate cuts are required; they’d have to tell the mayor by mid-April what they would cut. Then by early May, they’d find out the “reduction target” for 2011-2012, and Parks would have to bring the city Budget Office a proposal by May 17 for reaching that target. About a month later, by mid-June, they would find out if the Budget Office would approve or reject that proposal. July 9, their budget would have to be turned into the mayor, who would review it during July and August, with decisions by the end of August, a budget speech in September, City Council changes in October, and a final budget adopted before Thanksgiving.
The mayor already knows things are looking ugly, of course, Everson said. So, asked board member John Barber, if you aren’t ordered to make midyear cuts, “when do you put on the brakes?”
Everson’s reply: Some open jobs already are being left open, with the anticipation that they’ll have internal candidates if and when other jobs have to be cut.
Board member Diana Kincaid asked if levy money could be changed from capital to maintenance. Everson’s reply: That was discussed with the Parks and Green Spaces Levy Oversight Committee when they got a budget briefing last Monday, but, Everson said, “there are legal restrictions – you can’t turn the levy upside down.” However, they could “sequence” the building program. (And that’s where Gallagher jumped in to say, “One of the unintended consequences is the possibility any levy project that could result in new maintenance might be put on hold – they would not go out to bid. All these considerations are not pleasant.”)
Then the big question, from vice chair Adams: “How does the public weigh in?”
Everson observed that the process typically has not included public comment “until after the mayor proposes his budget at the end of September. Given the current situation, that doesn’t really seem adequate, but we don’t have a precedent to go on.”
Gallagher warned, “If we come up with some kind of public process about what kind of line of business to get out of, it’ll turn into a case of who can organize the biggest turnout. We are looking for a way to get public input on this that is really something we could use.”
The Parks Board itself, of course, is also a public sounding board of sorts, since its members are all volunteers. They’ll have a meeting entirely devoted to budget issues in May. “We will know a lot by then,” Everson affirmed.
Even before that, Ramels asked that the April meeting include time to discuss “where do we go now as a board” in reviewing proposals and participating in the process. The board meets the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, so if this topic interests you, you’ll want to mark your calendar for future meetings, starting with April 8th.
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