Are we spending for Santa Claus or for Satan clause?

We’re not Santa, so we’ll leave it to him to decide whether Marion has been naughty or nice with recent changes in its spending policies.

In an apparent attempt to streamline operations, the city seems to have given greater authority to employees to make purchases that, in the past, might have required council approval in advance.

We’re not talking just about routine supplies, like water plant chemicals and utility poles. So-called consent agenda items this month have included a much broader list of purchases already made by employees and private citizens.

The Jolly Ol’ Gent from the North Pole may check his list twice, but — for better or worse — rarely do council members question any such items.

Some of the payments are huge and may involve things approved by the council long ago. A good example might be a $199,552 bill for painting and renovating the city’s large water tower.

There also are continuing charges such as $20,910 in licensing fees for a system, typically used only in larger cities, to record locations of electrical transformers and the like.

And there are what seem to be constantly increasing routine expenses such as those for computer monitoring ($1,000 every two weeks from Great Plains Computers) and an ever-expanding array of computer licenses and equipment ($1,263.24 for email monitoring, $760 for various software, $543.82 for Internet access, and $526.82 for a backup drive this month alone).

These might be inescapable costs of doing business, like the cocoa and candy canes Santa gives his elves. But there also seem to be some significant capital purchases, such as $6,386.51 for a rock auger, purchased for the city’s electricians. A furnace in the city building also was replaced at a cost of $4,590.

In the past, expenses such as these often came before the council for approval — before rather than after purchases were made.

Some charges appear as unavoidable as Rudolph earning his way into reindeer games. Take, for example, another thing that glows red — the lights on an ambulance — and the $604.50 paid to the county ambulance service to transport someone who apparently was in police custody but never was booked into jail.

Other charges are for things many in the community might regard as sweet treats, like the more than $9,248.01 for new Christmas decorations and support for the town’s Holly Jolly Christmas celebration Nov. 30.

Included in Christmas spending this month was $3,495.64, charged to the electric department for a new reindeer decoration across Main St. at 3rd St. It may have been a secret Santa gift, as it’s unclear who, if anyone, other than the electric department decided what to purchase.

Also filling the city’s Christmas spending stocking were:

■ $2,620 on Christmas lights from electrical supplier Resenhouse.

■ $1,000 for a petting zoo hired by the Historical Elgin Hotel.

■ $676.46 for garland and lights from Walmart.

■ $493.63 for signs, schedules, and flyers from Baker Bros. in Hillsboro.

■ $198.06 in Facebook ads purchased by the Elgin.

■ $180 to dedicated community volunteer Megan Jones for singing elves on Main St.

■ $150 to Gene Winkler for piped-in music and announcing at a Main St. parade.

■ $112.41 for ornaments from Amazon.

■ $99.29 in Christmas lights and extension cords charged on a city credit card at unspecified businesses.

■ $94.97 for other Christmas items from Marion County Ace Hardware.

■ $87.96 in park lights from Amazon.

■ $25 in website hosting from the Elgin.

■ $14.59 for money cards from the Quill online office supply firm.

City council members might well have put these items on their wish lists if they’d been asked to vote on them. So, too, might city voters as a whole. The city’s decorations and Holly Jolly celebration were regarded by many as welcome attempts to make our holiday merry and bright.

If you open the cards on these gifts, you’ll see that the money to buy them generally came from the city’s utility fund, which consists mainly of profits of the city selling electricity, and from the industrial development account of its general fund, a stocking filled mainly by tax on transient guests and a 0.75% sales tax.

An elf might argue that property tax dollars weren’t used, but a Grinch would point out that a dollar is a dollar, whatever source it comes from, and a dollar coming from something other than property taxes could be used to pay for something that otherwise would be paid by them.

In Marion, a mill of property taxes generates a little more than $14,000, so we’re talking about spending maybe 0.65 of a mill on Christmas — the equivalent of $10.65 in taxes on a $150,000 home. That’ll barely pay for milk and cookies for Santa and carrots for his reindeer.

We all like to splurge a bit at Christmas, but we also have to watch out for maxing out our credit cards. When greater latitude was given to city employees for making purchases without council approval, the idea was to end the year with healthy surpluses in every account.

If this year’s shopping spree for Christmas cheer depleted those surpluses, city accounts might end up with lumps of coal as the long-term impact of a few days of celebration.

But, as we said, we’re not Santa. The voters of Marion have to decide whether this is worth a “ho, ho, ho” or an “oh, oh, oh.”

— ERIC MEYER