Budgets from Thin Air, Possibility of Shutting Down the City

In this page, you'll hear audio recordings that show City leaders admitting that prior budgets were not based on "actuals" (ie, documented history from prior years). You'll hear leaders admitting that budgets came from "thin air".

You'll hear the Mayor discuss the experience of doing budget in 2023.  Apparently the budget committee had to close their eyes to the problems, otherwise the alternative was to shut down the City.  SCA notes this problem apparently continues through the 2024 budget process, due to the City's failure to reconcile bank statements to the ledger. 

In the SCA's opinion, this discussion corroborates Council leaders knowledge of prior year financial problems that were raised earlier in the 4/15/25 budget meeting. What is significant is:

• Acknowledgement that Budgets were not based on “actuals” (i.e., documented history from prior years). 
• Acknowledgement that Budgets did not come from the City’s accounting software (Caselle)
• Participants admitted budgets came from thin air. 
• One person admitted that prior budgets didn’t “foot properly” which means that the column totals don’t sum properly. 

 “This might clarify a little bit”  

"So, this is the budget that was presented to us in 23, alright? If you look on here, there is no actual. If you look on here, this didn’t come from Caselle. “

“Where did it come from?”

Various participants: “Excel” “thin air” 

“Oh, okay”

“Basically thin air” 

“Really? Oh my…”

“And, there …literally… ”

“And if you look at the process that we’re going through now, it didn’t foot properly either. 

[Context: When a budget doesn’t “foot” properly, it means the column totals don’t sum properly. ]

“Oh no”

“So, when we said how do you know what --how can you prove to me that there is $220,000 we can bank? you know --we can budget or we can estimate we’re gonna get $220,000 because that’s what we always get. What did we get this year?  I don’t know. “

“Yeah” 

“How can you not know what we got…”

“I just know about what it is…”

“Yeah. So, that is where we started from in 2023, and we’re trying to get that… so really what did we get this year? …”That’s gonna be more like – even on ours right now I can tell you is it says 220 is our budget. We’re gonna get more like $300 thousand, so that budget number is probably way off. So even that is wrong.” 

 In this excerpt, the Mayor expands on the experience of doing budget in 2023. It is stated that the budget committee had to close their eyes to the problems, otherwise the alternative was to shut down the City. SCA notes that this problem appeared to continue through the 2024 budget process, due to the problems noted elsewhere with lack of reconciliations.  

 “It requires a leap of faith”

“Well, I’ve done that before too”

"You know, again, going back to that…” “Going back to that year, that was a real leap of faith. We literally had to close our eyes and say whatever”

"OK"

"Because otherwise we were going to shut down the City by not having a budget." 

"Right"

"And, really, the last two years we were pushed to that extreme. Uhm., we either get a budget out there that we know can at least fund, maybe not know exactly how its funded, the breakout, but we know we can cover this budget. And if we didn’t our other option would have been to close the City down. "

"OK"

"And… for me, I would prefer to see the City continue to function while we try to figure it out. "

"Instead of Do not Enter signs"

" Yes exactly. That would have been our other option  to not have a budget. Without a budget you can’t operate.  We would have to close the doors… So, it hasn’t been fun, let’s put it that way."