Duluth opens books to get residents’ input on budget

Like other cash-strapped cities across metro Atlanta, Duluth has performed some budgetary slicing and dicing amid the dragging economy.

Hiring Freeze? Check.

Limit overtime? Done.

Halt merit and cost-of-living increases? You bet.

But with an expected $4 million revenue shortfall for fiscal year 2010, the city of 28,000 needed more far-reaching solutions. Fast.

In what could be an extreme example of civic transparency, Duluth has opened its books and is letting a group of residents help balance the city’s $17 million operating budget.

The brainchild of City Administrator Phil McLemore, the citizens budget committee is made up of 35-plus ordinary folks tasked with offering suggestions for cutbacks and ideas for generating revenue.

“We have to make some tough decisions,” said resident and committee member Jim Peniston, 63, who runs a nonprofit financial planning agency. “If, for example, it requires a millage-rate increase, it has citizens saying, ‘Yeah, it’s what you need to do.’

The committee has met once a week for three weeks, with a goal of wrapping up April 16. The budget needs to be in the City Council’s hands by early May.

The city’s seven departments have spelled out their operations and associated costs to committee members. They in turn have asked questions and pitched cost-saving measures. To rake in revenue, the panel has proposed a fee for street lights, a $10 charge for using court facilities, even an annual $25 fee for a Dumpster card.

Amy Henderson, spokeswoman for the Georgia Municipal Association, said public input during a city’s budget process isn’t unusual. But of Georgia’s 536 cities, Duluth’s formal approach to resident feedback is unique.

“It sounds like they’re taking it to another step,” Henderson said.

Georgia State University Professor Gregory Streib, an expert in local government, said it’s a bold move to give residents such responsibility.

“Frankly, if you talk to a lot of city officials, this would strike them as a pretty scary thing to do,” Streib said. “But it’s totally transparent and that’s what people talk about these days … letting people know what’s going on behind the curtains.”

Committee input will be weighed “very heavily,” Mayor Nancy Harris said. She said nothing is off the table, including layoffs, but noted that’s not a goal of the City Council. “We’re pretty lean and mean,” she said of the city’s staff of 138.

Statewide, more than 1,000 city employees have been laid off in the past six months, according to the Georgia Municipal Association.

Regardless of money-making ideas, balancing Duluth’s budget ultimately will come down to reducing city services or raising taxes, McLemore said.

“We should have raised taxes six years ago,” McLemore told the panel at an April 2 meeting. But the panel wasn’t ready to agree to that.

Citizen committee member John Bell, 62, said a modest tax increase, especially to fund public safety, would be acceptable to him.

“You have to pay for what you get,” Bell said.