Yesterday evening, County Executive Chris Coons delivered his budget address. He took about 40 minutes to deliver this, including an extensive setup of his Listening Tour (which rhetorically at least) looks like the approval cycle and then he got to a summary of the bad news:
- Property taxes will increase an average of $8.00/month (I imagine this number includes the reduced taxes paid by the City, right? In which case this average would be higher if the City was excluded.)
- Sewer taxes will increase an average of $2.00/month.
- Layoffs and/or furloughs are coming, and they are still negotiating with the unions. These go across all departments, including Public Safety. Layoffs would save $4.5M. But Coons indicates that he is still negotiating with unions and if they can come up with an alternative that still gets his savings number, he wants to hear that. But in an interview with Allan Loudell afterwards, Chris seemed to say that they’d definitely do layoffs by early May if they couldn’t make an alternative deal with the unions. He was very clear on this point, though, that county employees have to share some of the pain too.
- The budget looks to eliminate overlap in funding of services provided by others
- Cutting $75M from the Capital Budget — delaying some projects and canceling others.
- Cutting Grant Funding (WILMAPCO, Boy and Girl Scouts, Ministry of Caring, etc)
- Cutting volunteer Firefighters 8% ($300K)
- Cutting Contractual Services (engineering, landscaping)
- Eliminating/defunding 97 vacant positions for a savings of $6.5M
- No new vehicles
The text of the speech is up on th County’s website here.
The 2010 Budget Overview is here.
And the complete Recommended Operating Budget is here.
WDEL does have the video.
The additional bad news is that there is an expectation that 2011 won’t be much rosier, budget-wise.
Did you see it or hear it? So what do you think?