Ephrata looks at budget cuts

EPHRATA — Ephrata city staff members are hunting for a way to cover predicted shortfalls in 2010 for several of the city’s funds.

The information came as part of a report on the status of the city budget during the last city council meeting.

While the city expects a 7 percent increase in revenue, City Administrator Wes Crago said city staff is predicting spending in five of the city’s 28 funds to outpace the revenue. These include streets, library, cemetery, park and convention center funds.

“Normally we’re able to balance out fairly quickly all of the funds except for current expense, and then we work really hard to get current expense in line,” he said. “Current expense is fire, police, administration, city hall operations.”

The city is facing unique challenges this year, Crago said, including the recommendations to hire a new assistant fire chief and a police evidence technician.

“Some revenues are up. Our sales tax and real estate excise tax are both high, which gives us some abilities to do some things especially with capital improvements,” he said. “However, state revenues in general are down and anything related to streets is down because most of those are related to fuel use.”

He also pointed out the cost of materials is increasing faster than the revenues are increasing, and several initiatives limiting the growth of local government.

“Ephrata didn’t feel the pinch of that in the early 2000s because we had the infusion of Walmart revenue,” Crago said. “A lot of our spending was done with grants. We’ve also been very creative with how we’ve done things. We’ve become very efficient.”

The city also hired staff for less than what other cities pay, Crago said, adding the city can’t continue to do that, especially in the police department.

As a result of the $373,660 projected shortfall between the five funds, the staff is looking at various solutions, Crago said. The solutions are still preliminary and the city doesn’t have any definite plans.

“These are not endorsed (or) supported at this time or necessarily likely, but we are looking at them and evaluating them,” he said.

The proposed solutions include reductions in street, cemetery, utility, park and facility maintenance and cutting hours at Splashzone and the library. City staff is also examining limiting snow removal and police response and reducing support for Basin Summer Sounds.

“If we want to make an increase in police response for gangs and crime, we need to reduce police response to non-emergency issues. An example would be animal control calls. Animal control calls, barking dogs are the number one complaint to MACC for emergency response,” he said. “These are pretty drastic examples, obviously our goal is to not have to enact any of those, but that’s going to take some creativity and some dedication on the part of your city staff.”

The city is also looking at ways to increase revenues, such as increasing prices for recreation offerings, utility taxes, fees for city services, Crago said. The city needs to look for ways to increase the amount of money it gets.

“We have done all we could for essentially the last decade to become efficient, to become manpower lean and to do what we can to keep our taxes and our rates as low as possible,” he said. “We believe we’re not going to be able to go forward in 2011 without looking at enhancing our revenue in significant ways.”