Jackson Jambalaya

Jackson Ward 2 City Councilman Melvin Priester, Jr. provided his assessment of the city's finances in this post on his public Facebook page Tuesday:

So here's where we are financially.

We originally were scheduled to start having budget hearings tomorrow (Wednesday). Thursday evening of last week, the administration asked if we could push that back to the 15th (Monday) because some critical numbers were still in flux to the tune of millions of dollars. We agreed to that request. Hopefully the mayor will now have a draft budget by close of business tomorrow.

For tonight's meeting, the delay in getting a proposed fy17 budget is going to make things stressful. The ham handed dealing with the financial transparency software is also going to make things less than pleasant.

For example, the mayor is bringing back the contract with the consultants for the consent decree at the same time he's requesting that we downgrade expected income in the water sewer department by 8.5 million dollars. He insisted at the work session yesterday that we already have set aside 2.5 million worth of water sewer money to pay for this consultant. But, if we know at this time that our revenue projections were off so much, how are we supposed to know if 2.5 million is still an amount we can afford. My take on the numbers is that it's not an amount we actually can afford. Looking back through past consent decree spending on consultants also makes me think the numbers with the company being pushed are not in fact a saving despite what was said at work session.

In any event, this whole debacle is why I am so furious about the fact that open gov, the financial transparency tool, has not been implemented. The excuse about incompatibility is ridiculous. Open gov has flat out offered to send technical specialists out to deal with our system and make it talk to their technology. This is what they do. Jackson is not the only city using outdated programs. But it got tossed aside without even a "hey guys, we know we bought this but we are going to ignore dealing with it. Sorry."

This open gov situation is a repeat of the Raftelis situation. Raftelis was the consulting group Keisha Powell insisted we hire to look into the water sewer financial situation. We spent $750,000 for them to give advice on how to fix the water sewer financials two years ago. The bulk of their advice never got implemented and the financial picture in that area remains clouded.

That's why we pushed to invest in open gov a year ago. Now it's budget time again and we continue to be hamstrung.

Consequently, even if we are trying to cooperate (by for example, not flipping tables when asked to push back budget hearings), there's not a lot of trust in city hall right now. There is no reason to trust numbers coming out of the mayor's office because they flat out lied and were hugely wrong about numbers last year such as whether we were meeting the reserve. Maybe if after those events they had seriously attempted to implement open gov. there would be more faith. But it was just more excuses.

This all comes to a head tonight as it's hard to trust that we have enough money to hire a 2.5 million consent decree consultant when the budget is late and during the same meeting you're saying we need to cut revenue projections in that area by 8.5 million. It's hard to trust that we have the money to hire this consultant when in the same meeting we are being told also that we need to finalize a water sewer debt refinancing before the end of September to avoid major financial problems.

Nothing is adding up right now.

On a related note, I'm not voting in favor of authorizing litigation against Siemens as Councilman Stokes requests. I'm not a fan of this contract or the results we're getting, but strategically, moving to a litigation footing right now would hurt the citizens more than it would help at this point.

There has been a lot of compromise between the public works department and Siemens recently that is getting us over the hump to just getting a system that works. This proposal from Councilman Stokes would set things back rather than move things forward. I'd like to say more but if this does ultimately go to litigation I don't want anything I say to be detrimental to Jackson's suit or any cross claims against the city brought by Siemens. I will be doing a lot of tongue biting and frustrated sighing though tonight.

This is the second meeting in a row where Councilman Stokes is proposing to blow up a major contract (last time was the Jatran Contract). Feels great to rattle sabers but rattling sabers in my experience only shuts down communications and causes things to freeze up even worse than before.