CINCINNATI, OH (FOX19) -
Cincinnati City Council voted Friday to
approve a budget for the first half of 2013.
"We took a very hard budget with a
deficit and we balanced it. I mean, there were tough cuts but we were able to
save some of the important services we provide," council member Chris Seelbach
said Friday.
"They key message here is that we still
have a fiscally unstructured balanced budget so we haven't solved anything
here," argued Chris Smitherman. "We've just put Band-Aids around the edges."
Smitherman says he suggested lowering
expenses by lowering headcount in upper management positions.
Council also voted to increase property
taxes to generate just under $29 million for the city. That vote
returned the millage rate to prior levels.
"With the [natural gas and electricity]
aggregation decision we save citizens lots and lots of money and I want them to
think about that when they think about the decision we made to go back to the
rollback," Yvette Simpson said."We are continuing the momentum and the growth
and most citizens will not be largely impacted by that."
"My position is, how can we ask taxpayers
to pay more when we don't have the guts to make the cuts?" Quinlivan
questioned. "The majority of the council does not want to make cuts in police
and fire and without making cuts in the biggest portion of our budget that
continues to grow and grow we have to come up with other solutions."
The budget saves the city's mounted
police patrol and does not include any job cuts.
While city council members did not
directly vote on whether to privatize city parking, one vote to restore the
income tax reciprocity credit did include an understanding that $4.8 million of
parking franchise revenue in 2013 would be used to offset a
budget gap.
"The reason why I didn't support this
budget was largely that outsourcing parking was the cornerstone of getting
through this budget," P.G. Sittenfeld said. "And I see that as really halting
some of the progress we're seeing."
"The budget is balanced with some
assumptions on selling our parking system, it's very difficult to dress this
pig up any other way," Chris Smitherman argued.
Some council members argue, however, that
they still have time to come up with other ways to address budget concerns for
the next fiscal year outside of the proposed privatization of parking.
"For those that don't like some of the
options that are currently on the table there's ample time for them as well as
the rest of us to try to find another way," Wendell Young offered.
Council members are expected to take a
vote on the decision of whether to privatize parking sometime in March.
There is undeniably a chance that if we
didn't do what we did today police officers and fire fighters would have lost
their job," Chris Seelbach told FOX19.
According to the city's website, the
six month appropriation presented by the City Manager totals $177,603,950.
Copyright 2012 WXIX. All rights reserved.
FOX19-WXIX
