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City Council approves 2019-20 spending plan, but with flaws

Jeremy M. Lazarus | 5/18/2019, 6 a.m.
“We made it,” City Council President Cynthia I. Newbille said after the council approved the 2019-20 budget Monday night without ...

“We made it,” City Council President Cynthia I. Newbille said after the council approved the 2019-20 budget Monday night without discussion.

There was no comment on the shaky nature of a spending plan that relies on one-time revenues, a raid on the city’s pension fund and the city’s first ever cigarette tax to cover expenses, and also depends on rising property values amid warnings from some Wall Street mavens about a coming recession.

Overall, the $746.2 million spending plan that City Council approved increases city outlays by nearly 4 percent over the current budget. The budget package means city spending will amount to $3,272 for each the 228,000 estimated residents, or about $120 more per person in the fiscal year that begins July 1.

As expected, the approved budget will deliver big wins for school staff and city workers in the form of the largest pay increases in years, including 5 percent for teachers and other staff with help from the state, and 3 percent for city employees, except for police and firefighters whose pay was boosted previously.

Richmond Public Schools also garnered the nearly $18 million it had sought to pay for teacher salary increases and to cover the second year of Superintendent Jason Kamras’ turnaround plan. RPS also won budget support for borrowing $19 million to give school maintenance a significant one-time boost.

Other beneficiaries include bus riders, with GRTC receiving $800,000 extra to improve service to a new Church Hill grocery store and extend service hours to areas of South Side.

The council also agreed to borrow $15 million to beef up street paving — a one-time shot in the arm for the city Department of Public Works to address decaying streets — and approved a proposal to increase a city lending program aimed at assisting developers to create less costly housing from $2 million to $2.9 million.

The biggest losers are smokers, and possibly employees of the convenience stores that rely on the sales of cigarettes. City Council is counting on raising $3 million from adding a 50-cent city tax to the price of a pack of cigarettes, with $600,000 to be sent to the Richmond City Health District to pay for programs to help smokers quit.

Store owners warned City Council that customers will bypass them to buy smokes, gas and other products in nearby stores in Henrico and Chesterfield counties that do not have a local tax. The owners’ prediction: Sales and sales tax collections for the city would fall and the drop would force layoffs of 100 or more store clerks.

“This is an investment in the city’s future,” Mayor Levar M. Stoney said Tuesday in celebrating approval of most of his priorities, despite having the council reject his proposal for a 9-cent hike in the property tax rate, the city’s most significant form of tax revenue.

The council avoided a tax increase, not by shrinking the government, but by gaining recognition for a projected one-time increase in property taxes of about $6.5 million, based on a revised estimate of real estate tax values from City Assessor Richie N. McKeithen.

Another $3 million came from approving 1st District Councilman Andreas Addison’s idea of offering incentives to get some of the 200 city workers who are eligible for retirement to leave so they could be replaced by newer, lower-paid workers.

The only problem is the impact that proposal will have on the city’s struggling pension plan.

In 2014, City Council approved a similar, two-year plan with the goal of generating $6 million in salary savings. The plan generated only about $3.5 million over the two years after about 132 employees retired, but it cost the city’s pension plan $15 million, according to Leo Griffin, executive director of the Richmond Retirement System.

The city is spending about $790,000 a year to repay that cost, a bill that will take 20 years to pay off, he said.

Mr. Griffin said the RRS, which has assets of about $744 million, was not asked to evaluate the cost of the new plan, but he said he expects the assets of the system will take another hit with the latest program.

The new program comes at a time when the system is paring its expectations for investment returns, Mr. Griffin said, and also changing its mortality projections to reflect that retirees are living longer.

In a briefing for City Council on May 6, Mr. Griffin indicated the change is expected to drop the funded status of the system’s major benefit program from 65 percent to 60 percent, requiring the city to pay more in support each year as RRS seeks to reach a healthy level of funding, which is regarded as 80 percent to 90 percent.

That is bad news for city retirees, who have not received a cost of living increase in at least a decade, and who have previously been told that such a COLA would depend on the system reaching at least an 80 percent funded status.

Meanwhile, the council avoided taking steps to deal with the huge deferred maintenance issue the city faces.

For example, the council followed Mayor Stoney’s lead and provided $19 million for replacing roofs, boilers and air conditioning systems and dealing with other problems in the city’s aging schools.

But that was just for the 2019-20 school year, and the amount is far short of the $95 million the School Board projected is needed. Through 2024, the mayor proposed and council approved spending $4 million in the 2020-21 budget year for maintenance, $3 million in the 2021-22 budget year, $2.5 million in the 2022-23 budget year and nothing in the 2023-24 budget year.

In addition, as the mayor promised, he outlined a plan to spend an additional $650 million on new school construction through 2040, but that plan does not include money for maintenance of school buildings.

The street paving program follows a similar pattern. Bobby Vincent, director of the Public Works Department, has outlined a need for a minimum of $110 million to resurface the city’s streets and a need for $225 million to overhaul the streets’ fabric.

Council endorsed the mayor’s plan to provide $15 million in the 2019-20 fiscal year and also endorsed the mayor’s plan to cut that spending in each of the following four budget years to about $5 million a year.

And that doesn’t count a host of other capital improvement projects that are unfunded. For example, Fire Chief Melvin Carter hoped to get a start on planning to replace outdated fire stations, only to see most of the money stripped away so that the council could use it to balance the 2019-20 budget.

Councilman Michael J. Jones, 9th District, acknowledged as he reviewed council’s budget that “once again, we’ve kicked the can down the road” when it comes to dealing with maintenance and capital improvements. In his view, the council needs to come to grips with that problem.