Helicopter program a casualty of battle to keep taxes down

Whose fault is it the police helicopter program wasn't funded for next year?The easy answer is that all nine council members are to blame because not one of them made any motion during the monthlong budget process this summer to restore the $243,000 needed for operation of the helicopters.

The reasons for the council's inaction, however, are more complicated.

First and foremost, members were determined to adopt a budget that didn't require an increase in the property tax rate for fear of angering state legislators. Earlier this year, when the Legislature passed a law replacing 15 mills of property tax for Washburn University with a countywide sales tax, legislators said they didn't want other taxing entities in Topeka raising their levies and eating into the savings.

Holding the line on property tax rates benefited taxpayers, but it cost the city.

For the past two years, the city had been operating with artificially low mill levies as it spent some unusually large reserves that had built up.

By the time council members sat down to plan next year's budget, the reserves were depleted, meaning there was little left to make up the difference between the amount of revenue flowing into city coffers and the cost of maintaining services.

The normal response to that situation would have been to raise the levy back to the level needed to maintain services. Instead, the no- tax-increase budget adopted by the council in August provided the city with 8 percent less money to spend next year than this year.

And then there is the boy-who-cried-wolf factor. It had become common knowledge that the city ended each fiscal year with more unspent cash than called for in that year's operating budget.

Council members may have assumed the same thing would happen this year and that cushion could be used to fund the helicopter program.

Mayor Joan Wagnon repeatedly told the council it wouldn't happen under the tighter budgeting process her administration had implemented. But council members either weren't paying attention or didn't believe the mayor.

But it is true, Wagnon insists. Departments such as the police department no longer are allowed to create budgets assuming every position will remain filled for the entire year.

Each year some positions are vacant for a time as employees retire or resign. That gap allowed for a buildup of unpaid salary that showed up at the end of the year as carry-forward to the following year.

Also, each department used to have to predict how many employees would retire during the year and budget a generous amount to make payments for unused vacation and sick leave.

Under Wagnon's new budgeting procedures, those payments are made from a retirement reserve fund and not from the individual departmental budgets.

The bottom line is this: Wagnon insists she wasn't bluffing when she told council members the city's tight budget might ground the helicopter program. Now everyone is scrambling to come up with a plan to keep that from happening.

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