Marion budget again to be last-minute
Staff writer
Despite widespread concern — including from a majority of current council members — that Marion’s city budget was prepared too late and without sufficient council involvement last year, this year’s budget appears headed down the same path.
Mayor Mike Powers blames the situation on how “screwed up” the city is.
In a heated discussion after a council meeting Monday, he pleaded that his “new council” was “doing the best it can.”
An official budget proposal, increasing property taxes by as much as 15% on a typical Marion home, is being published in this week’s newspaper, as required by law.
It does not, however, reflect council consideration of specific items of city spending, Powers confirmed after Monday’s meeting, at which the budget was not discussed.
He insisted that interim administrator Mark McAnarney was preparing a list of items for council members to consider before the city’s final hearing on the budget Sept. 16.
However, the council is scheduled to meet only one time before that meeting.
Asked about budget preparation, Powers confirmed that council members had not yet, as councils have done in the past, met with department heads to review requests.
They have not yet, as other councils routinely do, looked at line items for payroll, consumables, capital purchases, and contractual services.
All they have done, he said, is look at account carryovers and decide, without taking a formal vote, what last year’s tax rate was and set a proposed budget at that level — 6.649 mills above the rate at which the city would receive the same amount of tax revenue.
The official budget form and dozens of pages of supporting documents typically accompanying it have never been included in packets publicly sent to council members in advance of meetings, including Monday night’s meeting.
When budget was discussed
The only discussion recorded in publicly available council minutes has been whether the city might want more tax money than it received last year and therefore might want to exceed its revenue-neutral tax rate.
No specific rate was discussed, according to those minutes, but the proposed budget being published this week includes one, nonetheless.
Only once during a documented council meeting did anyone on the council suggest a need to meet to discuss department head’s budget requests.
That happened May 20, when Powers suggested that the council schedule a work session on the budget June 10.
City Clerk Janet Robinson objected, suggesting that the council wait until after June 15, when property valuations would be known.
Powers questioned why spending needs would change based on how much money was available.
Robinson insisted they would.
No discussion of budgeting other than whether to notify the county that the city might exceed revenue neutrality appears on posted council minutes from June 3, June 17, or July 1 nor on adopted council minutes, not yet posted, for July 15 and Aug. 5.
Most of those meetings were unusually brief.
The Record did learn Monday that the council met twice in so-called work sessions to discuss budget items June 24 and July 22.
No agenda, minutes, nor information packets for those meetings have been available, nor was official notice of those meetings provided, as required by the Kansas Open Meetings Act.
Powers and Robinson said Monday that the lack of notice had been an oversight and would be corrected in the future.
Even so, Powers admitted Monday, specific items in the budget were not discussed in those work sessions.
Other models of budgeting
The city’s last-minute timetable for budget discussions differs sharply from what’s normal in other cities and had been normal in Marion.
Hillsboro’s city council, for example, spends a portion of every meeting for more than two months discussing its budget.
Ten years ago in Marion, the council scheduled a marathon all-day session on a Saturday to consider budget requests as openly and publicly as possible. That meeting was extensively covered by the newspaper.
An official handbook for the City of Emporia, where McAnarney was city manager before becoming interim city administrator in Marion, includes this timetable for budgeting:
In May, department heads submit requests while city commissioners discuss revenue sources, fund balances, personnel, and community improvement projects.
In June, department heads discuss these items with city commissioners.
In July, commissioners arrive at a proposed budget before publishing it for citizen comment.
In August or September, they conduct a budget hearing and a revenue neutrality hearing and adopt a final budget.
By this timetable, Marion is at least two months behind.
Concerns expressed last year
The same time compression happened in 2023. No discussion of budgetary items occurred until Aug. 21, when Vice Mayor Ruth Herbel brought them up for the first time in presiding over a meeting from which Mayor David Mayfield was absent.
The difference last year was that, although the council never reviewed individual line items in the budget, it did vote July 5 what mill rate to propose.
This year, the council did not officially vote on a rate to propose, saying instead that it could always decrease whatever rate was listed.
Last year, lack of council involvement was highlighted at the city’s official budget hearing by a series of questions about specific items in the budget.
Darvin Markley asked council member Kevin Burkholder about a proposed increase in the city’s community enrichment budget.
“Kevin, could you tell me what that’s for?” Markley asked. “Was there discussion on that?”
Burkholder answered: “No.”
Markley then asked Mayfield questions about the street and alleys budget.
“Is that for fixing potholes?” Markley asked.
“I don’t know,” Mayfield replied. “Probably.”
Council member Zach Collett then interrupted Markley, saying, “We’re not going to sit here and expect to answer every question you have.”
Markley responded that state law specified that the budget hearing was to allow citizens a chance to ask questions, hear answers, and propose changes.
But Mayfield cut him off by saying: “We don’t have that statute in front of us. I don’t even know what it says.”
The budget eventually was approved, without change, on a 3-2 vote. Herbel and Jerry Kline were opposed.
What happens elsewhere
Although no state law requires city councils to go over individual budget items in advance of preparing a proposed budget to be adopted at a budget hearing, it is virtually unheard of in the state for a council to fail to do so.
The Record queried newspapers statewide to ask about procedures used in similar cities around the state.
In no case could newspaper staff members recall a city having published a proposed budget without discussing and officially voting on it first.
Eddie Hibbs of the Erie Record termed such a case “very unusual.”
Sarah Kessinger of the Marysville Advocate said all cities, counties, and school boards covered by her paper always voted in advance of publishing a proposed budget.
“I can’t see how it would be ready for publication without the council approving it,” Steve Haynes of the Oberlin Herald said. “It’s certainly custom.”
Haynes suggested that councils really should allow for a meeting between their budget hearings and final adoption of their budgets.
That way, cities would have time to respond to citizens’ concerns rather than have to pass a budget immediately after hearing concerns about it.
Robin Wunderlick of the Eureka Herald said a county her paper covers once had intended to take a formal vote on its budget but forgot to do so and ended up having to republish an updated version of the budget at additional expense to the county.
Why budgeting was delayed
Delays in budget preparation have been blamed on a revolving door for city administrators.
Last year, lateness was blamed on Administrator Brogan Jones having been on the job only since May 1. This year, McAnarney assumed his part-time interim post Feb. 15.
The proposed budget being published this week came not from McAnarney but from Robinson.
Mayfield appointed Robinson as Marion’s city clerk in January, 2023, even though the City of Florence had asked her to resign as clerk there in July, 2019.
No one on the Florence council has ever stated publicly why Robinson was asked to resign, but some have said off the record that it was in part because she had tried to cut the council out of budgeting discussions.
Under Marion City Code, the council is responsible for the city’s annual budget. The clerk is tasked only with assisting in the process.
Concerns before election
Failure to involve the council in budgeting last year became an issue in last fall’s mayoral and council elections.
Before the election, candidates were unanimous in wanting to spend more time examining budget proposals than the council did that year.
Powers said before the election that the mayor and city administrator should have a series of meetings with each department head to set spending priorities. He added that the city had an obligation to spend enough time to do that.
As a candidate, Tim Baxa said that department heads, the city administrator, and council members should do a better job of working together on budget matters.
He specifically suggested that department heads report to the council what big-ticket items might not be necessary.
Burkholder said he would have liked to have seen more discussion of the budget before having to make a decision.
He said he liked the idea of doing budget planning the way Hillsboro does, by having a budget drafted in June and then talking about and refining it at every meeting until the city’s budget hearing in September.
Amy Smith said council members needed to discuss things in public and not allow decisions to be made “behind someone’s back.”
“I feel like so many people are taking out of the money jar,” she said, noting that 2023’s budgeting process “looked to me that nobody knew what was going on.”
What’s included in the budget has additional significance in Marion now that the council has given broad authority to department heads to make large purchases without council approval if an item is included in the budget.
The county and many other cities regard the budget as setting money aside but not as final approval to make a purchase.
Another election promise
Greater involvement in budgeting isn’t the first pre-election promise that has to date gone by the wayside.
More than a year and a half ago, problems were noted in the city’s governing charter ordinances.
City Attorney Brian Bina and the council agreed at that time that those ordinances needed to be revisited.
Before the election, Powers said: “We’ve got to do it.”
He said that the first thing he would do upon taking office was determine what the problems were.
Eight months later, Powers admitted with regret Monday, the topic still has not been broached at a city council meeting.