This is what I said at the budget meeting:

Mr. Chuck Fredrick, 1511 Madison Street, stated “this budget is a joke. We don’t need to cut services or raise

the mill levy.” Numerous times he has given ideas on how to cut costs and the Council has not listened to him.

Some of the ideas he has proposed to the Council are: hire a full-time city attorney, do a monthly budget sheet.

take away the billing duties from the rescue squad and give them back to Cashflow Billing which would have

saved us four million dollars now, payroll should be done in-house rather than outsourcing which costs $4,000

or $5,000 per month, we should not have hired an Assistant City Administrator, the $26,000 pool study could

have been done in-house. Mr. Fredrick stated that he wants to direct attention to a couple things on the budget.

“On page one, under variance versus prior year, you’ve got us saving 13.3% for the next year. If you would

subtract the basically ten million dollars for the Police Department, which would make it $38,700,000 for this

year and you’re budgeting $42,000,000 for next year, you’re not decreasing the amount you’re spending, you

are increasing the amount. Then on page seven, an interesting thing: you’ve got cell tower revenue gone due to

asset sales. We get $200,000 a year for our cell tower income now and you’ve got asset sale of selling of

$250,000. I have myself and many other people who will buy it for that amount of money. He stated that he

has talked to Assistant City Administrator Larry Burks who said that it was going to be sold for $2,000,000 or

$2,500,000. “First of all, the numbers are wrong and then you’re going to be killing the goose that laid the

golden egg again. I’d rather have you borrow money and keep that income coming for the rest of the time

rather than to sell it at all. The numbers aren’t right here. It doesn’t make sense to me how you look at some of

these things and scare us into trying to think we need to have to raise the taxes or reduce services and that’s not

true.”