COMMENTARY

MARK SCHUMANN

Given the sharp and deep budget cuts Mayor Craig Fletcher and Councilwoman Pilar Turner are advocating in preparation for the sale of the city’s electric system, for these two council members to continue letting the city pay $9,126 a year each toward their health insurance borders on hypocrisy.

As self-described fiscal conservatives, surely Fletcher and Turner would not dismiss as insignificant the $18,252-a-year cost to the city for their health insurance.  Surely they would instead agree that every dollar counts, especially when the city is facing a $2.2 million budget shortfall.

Interestingly, none of the city’s part-time employees receive a health insurance benefit, including long-serving staffers working 30 hours a week.  The Council, however, has seen fit to offer this benefit to its members.  At present, only Fletcher and Turner are partaking of this slice of pork.

Turner, for one, is often repeating the Tea Party line about how government should deliver only essential services.  How can providing a health insurance benefit to part-time council members be considered an “essential” service, especially when those council members are comfortably retired, if not independently wealthy?

Turner has argued that dependence on revenue from utilities has lead to a bloated city government now offering unrealistically generous employee benefits.  Assuming Turner is right, perhaps eliminating the health insurance benefit for council members would be one place to begin trimming some of the “excessively generous” benefits the city can no longer afford to offer.

With the sale of Vero Electric, the city will need to cut $2.2 million in expenses, raise taxes some 50 percent, or adopt a strategy that employs some combination of spending cuts and tax increases.  If drastic spending cuts are to be made, the council should share in this pain.

Currently 33 percent of all the city’s administrative expenses are charged to Vero Electric.  For example, one-third of City Manager Jim O’Connor’s salary and benefits is charged to the electric system.  Likewise, Vero Electric pays for one-third of the cost of the finance department, the clerk’s office, the city attorney’s office, and the $96,000-a-year budget of the City Council.

If the Council is no longer going to be responsible for managing, or in some cases mismanaging, an electric utility, then council members need to be prepared to reduce their budget proportionately.

At one level, the question of whether city council members should be the only part-time city employees receiving a health insurance benefit is an issue of fairness. If Fletcher and Turner are going to advocate for severe austerity measures with any degree of credibility, then they should lead by example.  The best example they can set now would be to stop asking the city to provide them with a health insurance benefit.  It is time for Fletcher and Turner to walk their talk.