While we broadly identify public safety as a high priority, that area is not limited to the cost of personnel. We need to equip, train and support that staff. So within the safety category, you would need to pay for the buildings, utilities and maintenance required by those departments.

Your observation that some City revenues are restricted seems to resort to the former City Administrator’s imagery of budgetary buckets. Even recognizing that the total budget has restricted sub-budgets, does not reduce the need for priorities in the whole budget as well as within those restricted budgets. Parks has a restricted millage and receives general funds (supposedly in the same proportion to the whole general fund as existed when the parks millage passed). Within that parks budget there is a need to set priorities to get the most out of our resources.

While the general sense of priorities must be identified by the governing body,the actual burden of forming a priority based budget would still fall on our professional staff. If the Council guides the staff by setting priorities, the budget fight will not be a decision between animal control or human services. The budget likely includes spending that is less important than both of those services.

The purpose of setting priorities is to avoid leaving needed improvements to public safety as an afterthought in a general fund budget of about $79 million. A decision on how to spend the last available million should be between relatively low priority items.

The very difficult job of elected officials in budget deliberations is to sort out the different types of needs and allocate funding to each. This is likely to be a qualitative judgment rather than a quantifiable measure like a priority rating.

Nevertheless, in my world, children’s hunger is MUCH more important than the welfare of animals. And being dismissive by saying that “it would be hard to imagine completely eradicating hunger” shows a lack of both imagination and compassion. I am talking about Washtenaw County, not the world! It can, and should, be done here.

Perhaps a better approach is to identify discretionary items and items deemed to have either statutory (including restricted funds, etc.) or high community priority. So we have a high community priority for public safety. Much money for parks is from dedicated millages, and parks are also a high community priority. Those are easy. Identifying the discretionary items is the tricky part.

Unfortunately, the City does not use a priority based budgeting method, such as zero-based budgeting. Instead, the City starts each budget by tinkering with the prior budget. The act of increasing funding in one area requires new revenue or cuts to another area.

Under the City’s current method, the bureaucratic struggle to maintain budgets prevails over a common sense ordering of priorities. Rather than requiring an affirmative finding of need to justify each spending decision, one must create an argument to justify cuts.

If the City listed its spending priorities in order it could fund each one working down the list from most important to least important. The final budget would fund those items that had been deemed more important than the things that could not be afforded. This isn’t a complex concept and is not a difficult process. It does take some discipline and some candor about what the City sees as its priorities. It is the most responsible way to budget scarce resources.