A new parks proposal
A new parks proposal
Doug Diny's defense of his new zero-based budgeting approach and plan to detach the city's parks department.
Mayor Diny earlier this month announced a surprising new proposal: Breaking up the city/county parks department and creating a new city parks department under the Public Works Department. Diny claimed it would save the city between $400,000 and $500,000.
The proposal blindsided council members, and many questioned the numbers, saying there hadn’t been enough analysis done to know whether or not it would actually save anything. Diny says it’s part of his zero-based budgeting plan, which starts from the assumption that all spending is unnecessary and needs to be justified in the next budget year.
The Wausonian reached out to Mayor Diny and to City Council President Lisa Rasmussen to make their cases. We’re running Diny’s open letter today, and Rasmussen’s tomorrow.
Mayor Diny’s defense of his parks proposal/zero-based budgeting
MAYOR EXPLAINS THE NEED FOR ZERO-BASED BUDGETING
Editor (BC),
We have to try. We need to take sensible actions to address the city's precarious fiscal position. Wausau has borrowed too much. We have raised water rates 60%. Our working capital is low. We have committed to an accelerated lead service line replacement without knowing either the cost or where the money will come from. And, to top it all off, the 2023 city revaluation will cause many property owners to see a double-digit increase in their taxes this December.
The path we are on is not sustainable. High taxes, high debt and high water rates handicap growth and new investment. Continuing to raise rates and borrow more is no solution.
How do we turn this around? We sharpen our pencils and get to work. Fortunately, we do not have to reinvent the wheel. We can incorporate best practice from well-known constructs such as Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB).
For many bureaucratic organizations, growth is on auto-pilot. They start their budget process with the assumption that everything the organization is doing now is important and valuable and deserves continued funding. Then the budget discussion is confined to adding new things only. There is no re-evaluation or re-prioritization.
In ZBB, we turn that thinking on its head. We start with the assumption that last year's spending was unnecessary. Then a justification must be developed for why specific item should be put back into the budget.
A few members of the council seem to be deeply ingrained in the old way of thinking—and they have been vocal and demonstrative about it. Understand, they would have you believe that a six-figure consultant's report and a mound of evidence is necessary to discuss removing any items from the budget.
The city-county parks department has been evolving under that old way of thinking for over fifty years. It now has 44.00 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions. Seven of them are supervisors or managers. That means we have one supervisor for every 5.25 FTE workers. That seems like it is too much. In ZBB, we start with the assumption that we do have too many supervisors and managers and then see if we can come up with a rationale for keeping any of them.
Again, we cannot continue the path of raising rates, borrowing more and spending more. I would like to invite those council members who have been complaining to have an open mind and join me and the other council members in using the ZBB framework to re-imagine city government in Wausau.
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