DGreport.com

If there’s something good to come from this agonizing budget season, maybe it’s the call by several commissioners for a debriefing where both the council and the community can discuss how the process can be improved.

“We need to look at the process and what we’ve done right and and what we can do better in the future,” said Commissioner Marilyn Schnell.  “If we do that, the process next year will be easier for the public to understand.”

Speaking as a member of that public, there were definite limits to my understanding as I watched the process unfold. Admittedly, I did not attend all eight long-range planning sessions or every budget hearing. However, I did tune in to some of the above and all recent council meetings leading up to the inexorable finale on Dec. 1.

As the process ground down, I couldn’t help but feel I was missing something. The discussion on Nov. 17 of a pared-down Heritage Fest led a week later to an unexpected “compromise” that traded the 2010 festival for a modest reprieve for the doomed Counseling and Social Services department.

This compromise was alluded to, rather than threshed out on the dais. And by the Dec. 1 meeting just a week later, at least one commissioner, William Waldack, was apparently already feeling like he’d been sold a bill of goods.

“Last week, we did the head-nod and it was presented as a way of extending Counseling and Social Services for a while to help people who are in need,” he said. “I regret doing that, because the village manager has decided we are on track to close it by the end of the year.

“The money we save from canceling Heritage Fest is not going to Counseling and Social Services,” Waldack said. “Why? Because months ago we determined, come hell or high water, we’re going to make these cuts.”

Waldack also took issue with the council’s decision to plow whatever monies resulted from closing the counseling department back into the reserve fund, despite an earlier agreement among commissioners to use about $1 million in reserve cash to fund the shortfall.

While few residents would argue that deep cuts were necessary — the village faced a daunting $4.5 million deficit for 2010 — some might wonder at the choices made or their impact on them. Despite hundreds of residents who turned out to speak to the proposed cuts — “truly unprecedented input,” Schnell called it — little of what was said seemed to sway the council’s deliberations.

This is regrettable because, as several commissioners noted, there is no certainty that the serious challenges facing the council this year will be resolved by the next budget cycle. If the economy doesn’t improve, the 2011 cuts may come even closer to the bone, slicing into the “core services” — police, fire and public works — that  some on the council have espoused as the village’s fundamental responsibility.

“It was great all the residents came out,” Waldack said. “I hope they aren’t discouraged in the future because the people who came out went home thinking they had no effect and, in my opinion, they didn’t have any effect.”

If “the math is irrefutable,” as the mayor repeatedly put it, so is the need for broad community buy-in and support. When the adopted budget is virtually a carbon copy of what was originally proposed — despite hours of resident comments and over the wishes of three council members — some are likely to believe their concerns and priorities were ignored or dismissed.

The repercussions may not be felt in a single terrible budget year, but they could become problematic if tougher, deeper cuts loom, such as may be eventually inevitable.

Absent a rapid and rosy recovery, the next big budgetary challenge could make cutting $72,000 worth of arts grants and the DARE program look like chump change.

Once the services that the village shouldn’t be in the business of providing are gone, there will be only one place to look: At core services. At the personnel expenses for police and fire and public works which “are so darn expensive it’s driving us out of business,” as the mayor said Dec. 1.

That’s where “good leadership” will be even more harshly tested, where the really tough decisions are going to be made.  And they will require not only the consensus of the council, but huge support and buy-in from the taxpaying public, as well.

If we’ve seen anything this budget year, it’s that talk alone won’t get us where we need to go as a community, no matter how impassioned. For that it’s going to take widespread cooperation and resolve, based on two-way communication and implicit trust.

Please show us how the sausage is made. All of it.