Seattle Mayor Ed Murray evidently thinks he is being fiscally prudent by “telling all city departments to leave 1 percent of their 2014 budgets unspent” as reported in Seattle blog Crosscut, since city revenues are not growing fast enough for everything its city officials want to spend money on.
The city notes that “the city’s revenue growth has remained at a moderate pace — between 3.5 percent and 4 percent annually,” but that is not enough with a Socialist-inspired City Council.
Perhaps if Mayor Murray had some private sector experience (which he does not), he would have looked at the city’s $1 billion dollar general fund budget, and determined where he could trim $25 million (or 2.5% of the budget) – or maybe what new program he would delay funding.
No, instead Murray felt the need to tell the city’s budget folks something their private sector counterparts already know – you don’t spend everything in your budget down to the last penny just because it’s in the budget.
Of course, a larger problem might be what Murray’s Budget Chief Ben Noble admitted: “In the language of some budget people, we have a structural problem. We are spending more than we are taking in.”
Yet, for the liberals running city government, that’s not a problem. It’s business as usual.
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