Budget Committee Meeting

For the first time in five months the Budget Committee, chaired by Councilman Knode, held a meeting to discuss the 8 month overdue 2006/2007 City budget. They met on Thursday, February 22nd at 6:30PM at the Community Center. As you might expect, nothing was accomplished.

The best suggestion made came from Councilman Schneider who asked that they table the trash service issue and put all but $50,000.00 of that line item (to be used to help residents in need) into the City's reserve fund. This would have let the city to move forward on all the issues the Council can agree on, while allowing debate on the trash service issue to continue. The trash service issue is the issue keeping a budget from being passed, yet no compromise can seem to be reached and there was no attempt to even vote on one.

When you hear that various things cannot be done because the City hasn't passed a budget, remember the majority of the budget committee, chaired by Councilman Knode, would not separate the trash issue from the budget so that the city could move forward. Why can't you get your utility tax refund? That would seem to be because Chairman Knode and the majority on the budget committee seem to care more about the trash issue than anything else. They apparently don't see a problem with making you wait for your money.

There are people in Overland that want city paid trash service back and there are people in Overland who would rather have the 2 police officers, 2 public works employees and 1 police dispatcher back. This issue is worthy of research and debate. Yet, Chairman Knode and others will not share any specifics with us. Chairman Knode seems to think we want to know "what color the truck is". I doubt anyone cares (though I truly hope it's not hot pink). What residents want to know is if we will continue to have the unlimited pickup service we have now, how much we will still have to pay for this "City Paid" service and what will the service include.

For most residents, when we refer to the trash service in conversation, we are talking about trash, recycling, yard waste, white goods, etc. When we talk about trash service, we talk about the whole package. So why does the current proposal only address one portion of the entire service?

At this meeting Councilman Owensby stated that the City of St. Ann pays half of what we pay in Overland for trash service:

Once again, we have an issue with an comparing apples to oranges. According to Allied Waste the residents of St. Ann currently play $26.40 a quarter for trash service while the residents of Overland pay $49.14. However, Overland's service includes recycling (which is becoming mandatory in St. Louis County this year I believe). In St. Ann, recycling pickup costs the residents an additional $15.00 a quarter for a total of 41.40. That's a little bit less than a 8 dollar difference. However, the City of St. Ann handles yard waste pickup for the residents through their public works department, while Allied Waste picks ours up once a week. We could get down to St. Ann's rate if the City decided to use Public Works to pick up yard waste but I doubt we could do it weekly without rehiring 2 employees and likely taking on a few more.

If we could get to St. Ann's $41.40 a quarter rate what would that mean for Overland? According to the 2000 census Overland has 7012 households. A little math tells us that it would cost about $1,160,000.00 for trash service like St. Ann's, which does not include the cost of public works employees picking up yard waste. If we were to stick with weekly yard waste pickup by Allied Waste it would cost the City approximately $1,380,000.00 for trash service. The line item in the proposed budget is $616,000.00 (some suggested budget changes increase this by 30,000.00 or so) to pay for trash service even though it's currently costing about 1.3 million dollars.

We cannot get a straight answer to explain this difference. Chairman Knode and the majority of the Committee have yet to give us any specific numbers and they apparently have still not gone out for bid on this service to see what we can expect it to cost the taxpayers. They have yet to even officially explain who will be paying for the recycling and yard waste pickup. They call it "City Paid" trash, but as the Mayor said here this proposal only seems to cover a portion of the service which it seems will leave us still paying the majority of the bill anyway.

Tabling this issue until all the facts can be gathered and the issue can be properly debated seems entirely reasonable. We might have been able to address this had Chairman Knode spent the last 5 months getting bids and researching the costs. Since that apparently has not been done (I assume since nothing has been shared with the residents), the only logical choice is the set the trash issue aside until we have the hard numbers needed to properly and professionally approach the issue.

Since this budget committee meeting has already been the subject of several inaccurate rumors I decided to host it in its entirety. See it for yourself here and draw your own conclusions.

The Budget Committee adjourned after only 25 minutes. 25 minutes is all that was spent on the 8 month late City Budget. In the immortal words of Clara Peller: "Where's the Beef?!?" or in this case: Where's the leadership?