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Mayor Whitmire says his $7 billion budget proposal is completely balanced. Still, according to the city finance director, we could be looking at a shortfall as high as $500 million over the next five years. So will the next budget be balanced?
Finance Director Melissa Dubowski laid out a five-year forecast in a recent City Council meeting that projected the budget shortfall over the next five years to be anywhere from 100 to 500 million dollars. So, where is this shortfall coming from?
Former city councilman Greg Travis says this is largely thanks to the waste that occurred under previous mayoral administrations. He pointed specifically to Whitmire's predecessor, saying, "Mayor Turner pushed everything off that he could. He used the COVID funds wrong, he used them on frivolous matters. I don't know why he was doing that."
Essentially, Travis says Turner was just kicking cans down the road, and at the same time, continuing to waste money. He even called out Turner's hiring freeze, saying, "Every year we hired more and more people. I don't understand why if you do a hiring freeze, you end with a thousand more people at the end of your term than you did at the beginning of your term."
He went on to say that Whitmire can solve this budget problem, but it's going to require him to make some big cuts, and the city council could try to stop him. He said, "I think the councilors are going to do that for their own political gain, but I also think there are certain people who want to hurt Whitmire. They're gonna vote opposite of him just to give Whitmire a thumping."