The City of the Future?

Oklahoma state law requires municipalities to have balanced budgets. The dramatic cost cutting now underway in Tulsa, both in the media and reality arises from that fundamental dictate.

Whatever side of the political aisle you are on, the financial picture is not comforting and the future seems far from "shining city on the hill" status Ronald Reagan ascribed to America. The largest controllable cost item in the city budget is salaries. A seemingly humane idea in good times since as an employer you want to invest in people and families as best you can. We are now seeing the second edge of the money sword, as this hopefully humane item is also the only one big enough to close the budget balancing gap of over $10,000,000.

Tulsa's 2010 operating coxt budget is $519,361,000, a decrease of $4,257,000 from the previous year. Out of that total, $248,000,000 goes to public works and $186,000,000 to public safety. All remaining city operations get $85,316,000. Further, city revenues are were expected to decrease by $5,600,000 from previous year. The city is falling short of what was a tighter budget than last year.

The city employee base is divided amoung three separate unions. Police, fire, and city operational people all serve one employer, Tulsa, but separate masters, their union. We arrived at this situation by free market means. The employees voted on joining unions and the majority ruled. These unions bargain on behalf of the members with the city for wages as well as represent their members in situations like the current budget shortfall and negotiations.

In previous years, Tulsa sought to enhance sales tax revenues by capital projects geared toward entertainment, the BOK Arena and the new ONEOK baseball stadium. Both require police presence for security, spelled manpower, which means payroll dollars. Also came a move to a city hall with tranparency, not the O'bama kind but the glass kind, with relatively higher operating costs as well as a vacany rate. All these items impact the general fund budget that supports the payrolls.

No one could have foreseen the economic meltdown at the time the arena was built. The ballpark and City Hall?????? We now find outselves in the position of trading public safety payroll dollars for monuments. To be sure, in a budget as big as Tulsa's, one could argue other things could have been cut to protect our police and fire staffs. But it could also be argued that many of those things were cut from the previous year's budget to balance it, before the current year problem arose.

Stay tuned for the remaining five months of the fiscal year.