Starting to get gritty with the town budget

The Crested Butte parks look great. Little league and softball are played every day on fields of green. Elk Avenue is colorful and in tip-top shape. The toilets in town flush and fresh water comes out of the taps. The buses run regularly. Lord knows, there is no shortage of law enforcement, special event permits are processed, building permits (there may be a shortage there) are issued and everything in Crested Butte continues to rock-and-roll.
Except revenues.

Despite what appeared to be a big Fourth of July weekend, harsh economic reality seems to be setting in with the Crested Butte Town Council. Revenues from sales tax and the real estate transfer tax continue their hard decline. Fund balances won’t be there forever.
In a Monday brainstorming session the council asked the staff to look at ways to creatively make budget cuts. Mayor Alan Bernholtz repeatedly warned of possible cuts in town services. He said people shouldn’t get used to the level of service provided by the town the last three or four years.
The last thing to be touched according to Bernholtz is staff, their wages and benefits. It is people who make the town work and the town works pretty well right now. Crested Butte has a really good staff at the moment so looking last at staff adjustments is appropriate, but the powers that be admit that trimming some benefits might unfortunately be necessary. It is and should be on the table in these tough times. That’s a hard call for the council as the gritty part of the budget process begins.
FYI, 60 percent of the town’s general fund budget is wages, salaries and benefits. The town has 35 full-time, year-round employees, plus more who are considered seasonal or part-time workers. For example, kids who sometimes work as Little League coaches and umpires are included in that figure.
I hope no one working for the town sees a cut in pay or vacation or benefits. I wish my salary was going up instead of down and my health insurance premiums were going down instead of up. Who doesn’t?

Cutting a few flowers on Elk Avenue won’t right the ship and isn’t the right thing to do anyway. Actually more flowers might be a better budget investment in the long run.
The council hinted around that they understand there are times to spend money instead of trimming a line item that looks easy to cut. Good. That is important. It takes money to make money if you want the visitors to come and enjoy themselves and come again and spend their money in town. Elk Avenue needs to remain vibrant and attractive. Clean water needs to come out of the faucet. The parks need to be green. People need to be able to find their way around. It’s good for the people living here and the people visiting here.
The mayor suggested last month that the Mountain Express bus system could perhaps save money by running winter bus routes between Mt. Crested Butte and Crested Butte every 30 minutes instead of every 15 minutes. Uhh, don’t think so. Getting people from the rooms on the mountain to the businesses in Crested Butte is a key element to sales tax revenues. Making them wait 25 minutes for a bus to get downtown to eat dinner isn’t conducive to a good time. People will spend their money if they are having a good time. Spending money fills the sales tax bucket in the budget. Little things like summer flowers, frequent bus service and trash cans in the park go a long way to keeping visitors coming here.

The town department heads have seen the budget woes coming and made proactive and creative adjustments. Overtime is practically non-existent. They have adjusted programs to run in the black instead of counting on a subsidy. The employees have enthusiastically agreed to be cross-trained so they can handle tasks in more than one department. Programs like town clean-up are different now, so that it isn’t a regular drain on the budget. Nice work.
The staff is already doing the creative work the council asked them to do to trim the budget. There probably are more good ideas out there, but the low-hanging fruit has been picked.
The council suggested soliciting more community involvement and there might be ways to get the local businesses to step up and sponsor a flower box or pay for some sidewalk snow removal. But it’s not like most businesses are flush in this economic climate. It’s worth pursuing but expecting a $500,000 boost to the budget doesn’t seem realistic.

Credit the council for starting to address a difficult topic early in the 2010 budget cycle. Remember that in the real world, everything needs to be on the table and sometimes the smartest move is to invest in your product when everyone else is cutting. We are a tourist-based economy, after all.