Bloggin’ on the Edge

Posted by Scott Spielman at 3:00 AM | Comments

There’s one thing I don’t understand about the budget process in the City of Wayne.

Wayne City Council members approved the budget for the 2007-2008 fiscal year at their last meeting—on their second attempt. At the same meeting, they set a public hearing for the approval of the budget for the Downtown Development Authority (DDA), which will take place at the city council meeting on June 5.

The DDA had not hosted their public hearing on their proposed budget when the overall city budget was approved last Tuesday, either. That happened this week.

Why is this a concern?

Well, the city takes $5.1 million from the $6.1 million DDA budget to balance its own books. City officials have said they can defend that—it goes to pay for services provided within the DDA district, which stretches along Michigan Avenue and Wayne Road and includes the Ford Motor plants.

Without that $5.1 million, the general fund would be in dire shape. So what would happen if, after the city budget is approved, the DDA board didn’t approve theirs? What if they didn’t want to give about 82 percent of their budget to the city?

The answer is that that won’t happen.

That’s part of the issue in Wayne.

Our city leaders are always talking about the progress we’re making here. It’s not going as fast as we’d like, they’ll say, but we’re moving ahead.

The reason it’s not going as fast as they’d like is because our DDA isn’t as proactive as any other DDA board I’ve come across. Everywhere else I’ve gone, they meet monthly—at least. They plan. They brainstorm. They come up with ideas for improvements. Most of those DDA authorities don’t have anywhere near the budget that the City of Wayne DDA does, either.

The city also ran into another difficulty last week, when they wanted to postpone the approval of the budget to deal with the theater issue—and couldn’t. The charter dictates that they had to approve it at the second meeting in May.

So why, then, host the public hearing for it on the same day? There are very few benefits to waiting until the last minute to get something accomplished.

The very assumption that this will go off like this without a hitch is to me an indication that public input isn’t that important in the process.

I know there are plenty of study sessions and residents are welcome to provide input then. There’s no reason, though, why the public hearing couldn’t be scheduled in advance of the necessary adoption date, to allow the council to react to last minute input. It might mean getting things done earlier in the year, but there’s nothing wrong with that, either.

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