The city of Duluth's budget problems will be its biggest challenge headed into 2010, three new Duluth city councilors and a re-elected councilor said at a Tuesday morning forum, but they disagreed at times on how to address that challenge.
Saying that while they oppose raising fees and taxes, councilors-elect Dan Hartman, Kerry Gauthier and Patrick Boyle agreed that tough decisions would need to be made instead about what to cut from city services.
With the state expected to announce more budgetary bad news, and more cuts to local government aid likely, all councilors foresee city budget troubles.
"It will make it awfully tempting for my colleagues to create new fees, increase the fees they already have, or to look at the people of the city of Duluth and ask for more money," said Jim Stauber, an At Large councilor re-elected last month. "It has a devastating effect on our citizens and it has a devastating effect on our businesses as well."
Though Hartman said he doesn't know what next year's budget numbers will be, he was critical of absolute anti-tax stances like Stauber's.
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"People love to talk about: 'We can't have raises in taxes, we can't have raises in fees,' but they're unwilling to talk about what they're willing to cut," he said. "That has to be part of the dialogue as well. ... Give actual examples of what you're willing to cut."
"It's kind of shocking how bare-bones [the city] is right now," he added.
Stauber countered that the city still has "low-hanging fruit," such as its $3 million overtime budget, which he largely blamed on the city's public works department.
"It's costing you and I an arm and a leg to pay for that overtime," he said. "To say we need to pass that on to the citizens is wrong."
Stauber also suggested privatizing services such as snowplowing, which Gauthier, a staunch union advocate, said he opposed.
"There are things that taxpayers expect government to do, and one of those is public works," he said.
Boyle said residents need to be better educated on the cost of running the city, noting that of the 1,200 miles of city pipes, 80 percent are more than 80 years old, and they often break.
"We pay for our view," he said. "It's a lot less maintenance living across the bridge. ... We have to constantly reupgrade our system."
