Smart Budget Cuts At City Hall Confirm Wisdom Of Tax Reform

Published: Jun 30, 2007

The painful yet healthy cuts to the city payroll announced Thursday by Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio will save taxpayers lots of money without harming basic city services.

She spread the cuts smartly across departments and pay scales, sending well-paid managers packing along with some lower-level workers to save $15 million. Tampa must cut another $5 million or so to reach the level of savings demanded by the Legislature earlier this month.

Many cities and counties across the state are readjusting priorities and pulling their belts tighter than local officials deem comfortable. Without the required rollback of property taxes, cuts as deep as Iorio was forced to make would not have happened.

It's easy to focus on the good workers facing unemployment, most of whom have been quite busy in their own corners of public service. But whether taxpayers got their money's worth is another question. Until now there has been little incentive for a politician to shake things up, which would require admitting to creating an unnecessary position or making a bad hire. Yearly increases in property tax revenues masked many mistakes and inefficiencies.

Now, Iorio knows the city will get only about $158 million in property taxes instead of the $180 million anticipated earlier. She knows fuel prices, insurance, salaries and other costs will not also retreat 12 percent. City government had to slim down.

She eliminated 236 full-time positions, including the entire crime prevention bureau. These eight officers will be reassigned to open patrol positions.

The police chief says the change won't hurt the department's ability to stop crime. The question that comes to a taxpayer's mind is why the city had a crime prevention bureau if the same amount of crime can be prevented without it.

The answer is at the heart of this year's tax revolt. A rapid rise in property values automatically produced extra tax revenue, and while cities and counties concentrated on how to spend it, they forgot how much pain the collection of the extra money was causing property owners. Private salaries have been going up much slower than city and county payrolls.

The mayor's salary went up 11 percent in April, while the average pay for all jobs in the county was going up at about 4 percent, according to the latest available federal statistics.

The mayor's raise was well deserved because the job has been underpaid. But most government workers also have been getting raises far more generous than typically available in the private sector.

Budgets have been on an unsustainable climb. Cuts such as those Iorio made will invigorate local government, not weaken it. The next question is how to get the state government and schools to trim their top-heavy staffs.