N&O blogs its way through the City budget process, City Manager hiring

Sometimes, a downside of being a part-time blogger in a town covered by twice the usual number of professional journalists lies in not being able to get away from the day job to cover interesting local happenings.

On the flip side, a plus side to being a part-time blogger in such a town is... not being able to get away from the day job to cover interesting, yet surely mind-numbing, local happenings.

Which is why I'm sitting this week behind my desk at Ambacco while poor Matt Dees and I presume Mr. Gronberg are stuck over at City Hall, watching the budget sausage get made.

Dees is providing quasi-liveblogging of the budget meetings over at the Bulls Eye blog. Worth reading just for the color commentary alone: Eugene Brown taking on Ted Voorhees over a proposal for a condo project to need two water mains instead of one, the pain of rising fuel costs (and how Durham may not have budgeted enough for it), and the controversial solid waste budget, a major driver of the whopping proposed increase in Durham's city budget this coming year. (Also worth a read: today's print edition story on the fight over non-city agency funding.)

Of particular interest: Dees' reflection of City Councilfolks' frustrations over the budget proposal, which looks to be as relatively inscrutable as ever:

City Council members have not been shy in expressing their exasperation with what they see as shortcomings in the budget presentation.

Staff have frequently been criticized for not giving City Council — or the public, for that matter — enough detail. Budgets include the total dollar figure, number of employees and the percent difference. There's no breakdown of where or why the changes are happening.

Bertha Johnson, starting her first budget season as budget director, took the brunt of it yesterday.

Ah, a brand new budget director and a city manager in his last trip on the merry-go-round. Not, perhaps, the best combination. The rubber meets the road next week, when our elected officials decide exactly what to support and what not to support in the staff's recommendations.

This'll be an interesting year to see how the budget process comes together. In years immediately past, the Council faced the oddly-unifying influence of Thomas Stith, who was notorious for bringing last-minute budget cut ideas before staff and Council, creating a frustrated bloc of officials usually ready to move forward in their own direction.

This year, we've got a Council more clearly split along what we've called (to some folks' chagrin) the progressivist/institutionalist wings, wings that quite unfortunately tend to break loosely on race lines. Cleavages of the latter came up in the non-city agency discussion; will the differences on Council persist into next week's deliberations, or will a common sense of direction -- or, just maybe, a common frustration over this year's budget presentation -- carry through?

Comments

[Matt]

Mmm. Budget sausage.
Thanks for the shout out.
I'll be at it again today.