Council left out of budget process
Plan would increase property tax 10.57%
Staff writers
Ignoring city council members’ wishes that Marion delay publishing its proposed budget until they had a chance to examine it, other officials plowed ahead Tuesday and submitted a proposed budget without council involvement.
The council will get its first look at the proposed spending plan, which would increase property taxes by 10.57% and overall spending by 12.75%, at the same time taxpayers do — when turning to Page 13 in the Classified section of this week’s newspaper.
Officials pleaded with the newspaper Tuesday morning to accept the proposal for publication after the newspaper’s usual 5 p.m. Monday deadline despite the fact that 17 hours earlier council members had agreed to delay publication.
The council planned to reschedule a formal budget hearing, set for Sept. 2, which would have required publication this week, and instead use the Sept. 2 meeting to review spending requests before presenting them to taxpayers in a formal hearing Sept. 15.
So sure were council members of their decision Monday night that council member Amy Smith, contacted Tuesday evening by the Record, insisted that the formal hearing still would be Sept. 15 and had not been moved back to its original date of Sept. 2.
Told that the plan had been altered after the council met, she said only that she “would have to call somebody.”
Council member Kevin Burkholder also expressed concern.
When discussion Monday night focused on delaying publication, he had plaintively asked: “So, do you think that there’d be a chance, if we did like a study session before that date, we could all see it?”
Tuesday, after plans for the council to see the budget before it was published were dashed, Burkholder said he wished things had been left as council members had decided Monday.
“I guess, as a council member, I would like to look at it,” he said. “I guess I would prefer that.”
Council member Zach Collett did not respond to the Record’s request for comment Tuesday and council member Tim Baxa could not be reached.
The decision to go ahead and publish the budget represents the third year in a row that Marion, unlike most municipalities, has published a proposed budget without council members first meeting with department heads to go over and potentially pare spending requests.
Formal hearings conducted after budgets are proposed tend to be perfunctory — mere formalities, with no detailed discussion of specific spending requests.
The proposed budget still could be changed either at the formal hearing or before, but how much of a change might be made is unclear, and the public will not have another opportunity to see what changes might be proposed.
City administrator Brian Wells defended his decision not to delay publication of the proposal, which he and city clerk Janet Robinson put together.
Wells said he had consulted city attorney Brian Bina, who told him that if no formal vote on the dates had been taken at the meeting, it was not a binding decision.
Technically, budgets are to be presented by the clerk. In her 3½ years as clerk, all of the budgets she has presented have come at the last minute, without meaningful council input.
Wells contended that Monday night’s reluctance to go ahead with a formal hearing Sept. 2 was because the city’s accounting company, the Loyd Group, had not yet notified the city that the budget was in order.
Wells said that someone — though he didn’t know who — spoke to the Loyd Group the morning after the council met and was told accountants had reviewed the budget and were ready to talk to council members about it.
Wells said a council work session to review budget details would be scheduled for next week in anticipation of the formal hearing Sept. 2.
He said he didn’t know why a copy of the proposed budget had not been sent to council members before Monday’s meeting.
Agendas and packets of information normally available on Fridays before council meetings were not sent until mid-afternoon Monday and did not include anything on the budget.
Mayor Mike Powers said that Wells was the one who decided not to change the budget hearing date despite the council’s wishes.
“He chose not to move [the hearing date],” Powers said. “It’s going to take place on the day it was originally scheduled.
“The reason for setting the date back was to allow us to have the opportunity to review the budget before the budget hearing. We’re still going to have that opportunity before the budget hearing.”
Powers said that Sept. 15 had been discussed Monday night but that no recorded vote was taken, so the council’s decision was not binding.
He said that the proposed budget could be changed when council members reviewed it with the Loyd Group but that he didn’t think that was likely.
“I anticipate we will vote on it Sept. 2, but it could be as late as the 15th,” Powers said.
A delayed hearing still would have met state deadlines for presenting property tax budgets, but it would have been the most last-minute budget hearing Marion had ever conducted.
“I’d like to blame someone,” Powers said at Monday’s meeting, “but I don’t have anyone to blame. I really hoped that this year we would be better in this regard, but the timing of the changeover [to a new city administrator] didn’t work out well for us.”
In most municipalities, council members begin budget deliberations in May, meeting with department heads to go over budget requests and gradually cobble together a proposed budget.
For the third year in a row, that wasn’t what happened in Marion.
In 2023, after only one brief discussion that did not touch on departmental needs, a proposed budget calling for a 13.5% increase in city property taxes was unveiled to council members only moments before they met Aug. 7 to adopt it as the city’s proposed budget.
In 2024, a proposed budget calling for a tax increase of as much as 15% on a typical home was published Aug. 21 but without any line items having been discussed or voted on at public council meetings.
Last year, Powers blamed the delay on how “screwed up” the city was after David Mayfield’s time as mayor. He argued that his “new council” was “doing the best it can.”
This year, Powers told council members he had talked to Wells about setting deadlines for departments to present requests and have them considered by council members.
“That’s what I had hoped we would do this year,” he said, “but it just — it didn’t happen.”
Powers said Tuesday that this year’s delay was attributable to the transition between interim administrator Mark McAnarney, who began meeting with council members about the budget in general, and Wells, who didn’t continue the process.
“Wait till next year,” Powers said. “This is not the way the process is supposed to go, but this will not be done this way next year.”
At Monday’s meeting, Wells was instructed to meet with county clerk Ashley Herpich to see what might be needed to delay the hearing.
The county already has sent notices to all city taxpayers informing them of the Sept. 2 date.
The option of retaining the Sept. 2 date and having Powers work with Wells and the Loyd Group to publish a proposed budget that council hadn’t considered was discussed and seemingly rejected.
“I would rather we would do whatever we can do to take this back to our fallback position,” Powers said Monday, referring to having the formal hearing Sept. 15.