As I’m just receiving this two days into the budget debate, I don’t have time to go through it myself presently, so I thought I’d throw it out to readers for peruse themselves.

Read the budget details here.

This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2011.

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  1. I’ve spent a couple hours with this document. Since the headers lack much description of what the departments actually do (if anything) it’s often hard make much out of vast swathes of this.

    A few points do jump out though.

    1/ We’ve been told that overtime is an issue and the media has been given quotes about overtime over several years. Looking at the budget it appears overtime only became an issue in 2010 and it was not out of control before that.

    2/ We’ve been told that there is a goal to bring overtime in to check and it will be reduced by 10 or so percent. What we are not told is that that is 10% from the 2010 actuals, which were hundreds of percent, and in some cases over 1000 percent higher than 2009 actual and 2010 budget.

    3/ The biggest increases in the budget are for police and fire overtime… which I understand have been exempted from the overtime reduction edict. Why?

    Taken together these things – for me – point to a cynical gaming of the system by public service managers, petty potentates rewarding their loyal courtiers.

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