Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle‘s $1.93 billion spending plan does not represent “lean” government, City Council Budget Chairman Ernie Martin told Civil Beat.
“Have we got to a point where it’s really, really lean?” Ernie Martin asked. “Hard to make that argument when you hear the administration is continually advocating for vacant funded positions. You can expect some changes there.”
A Civil Beat investigation revealed that Carlisle budgeted more than $43 million to fund 1,095 unfilled jobs next year.
Martin said the council’s plan to eliminate some vacant funded positions represents one of several areas where the council will make “significant cuts” to Carlisle’s operating budget.
Martin’s criticism of Carlisle is notable given that the mayor campaigned on a platform of eliminating government waste and getting the city’s “financial house in order.”
Before Martin was elected to the City Council in November, he was on the mayor’s Cabinet as director of the Community Services Department. That experience, he says, makes him better equipped to identify government waste.
“I had the advantage of serving on the executive branch, I can see there’s still some fat that can be cut away,” Martin said. “No area is untouchable, put it that way.”
Martin says he hopes cutting the city’s operating costs will ultimately enable the city to ease the burden on taxpayers.
“We’re hoping it will get to the point where we can defer some of the user fee (bills), and we can look at possibly bringing the property tax rate down,” Martin said.
While the City Council looks at shrinking the mayor’s operating budget, it is considering growing capital spending.
“You may see the hearings are not very adversarial but that doesn’t mean the council is not going to take a very proactive step and bring some serious amendments,” Martin said. “We’ll be looking at raising the ceiling on capital spending.”
Carlisle proposed slashing capital spending 35 percent, but council members have raised concerns about the approach.
Council Public Works Chairman Stanley Chang has repeatedly questioned the administration about how it will adequately repair Honolulu’s roadways, which he calls a “huge, huge, huge priority” and a necessity to restore public faith in government.
“I was a little bit disappointed in the proposed $12 million capital improvement cut in road maintenance,” Chang said in a Budget Committee meeting earlier this month. “This is the state that wakes up earliest in the nation because we have the longest commute time and the worst roads… Our people are spending the longest time in the nation on the nation’s worst roads. It’s really a very important quality of life issue.”
Chang says Honolulu residents rank at the bottom in studies about the perception of value in tax dollars paid.
“My suspicion is that the quality of our roads has a large, large part to play,” Chang said.
Martin said the full council shares Chang’s concerns.
“All the members are struggling with the issue that the mayor did reduce the capital improvement program budget significantly from prior years,” Martin told Civil Beat. “The concern is that that’s going to put the city in a position where it’s going to fall behind even further on a lot of projects that need to be done.”
Council members are working on amendments ahead of a pair of special Budget Committee meetings April 12 and April 13.
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