DeKalb budget fight looms
DeKalb County’s elected leaders are struggling over how to balance the county’s 2015 budget.
Interim DeKalb CEO Lee May's proposed $1.1 billion budget relies on $19 million in one-time savings gained from refinancing bonds.
That plan has drawn opposition from commissioners who prefer savings from bond refinancing to be spread over time rather than taken up-front. Commissioners didn't act on a similar bond refinancing effort by May in November.
If the commission doesn’t refinance the bonds, the $19 million would have to be found elsewhere.
May and Deputy Chief Financial Officer Jay Vinicki presented several scenarios to commissioners during a Budget Committee meeting last week. They didn’t recommend any of these alternatives, but they wanted to show the difficulty of finding savings elsewhere.
Options include:
- Raising taxes by at least 1.1 mills
- Reducing the county's reserve funds from $37.5 million to $18.5 million
- Laying off more than 300 employees, mostly from police, fire and sheriff's departments
Other possibilities for saving money include making cuts from various departmental budgets, reducing spending for road resurfacing or a combination of various proposals.
The DeKalb Commission must pass a balanced budget by the end of February.
About the Author
Mark Niesse is an enterprise reporter and covers elections and Georgia government for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and is considered an expert on elections and voting. Before joining the AJC, he worked for The Associated Press in Atlanta, Honolulu and Montgomery, Alabama. He also reported for The Daily Report and The Santiago Times in Chile.
