The Puyallup City Council met for their pre-budget workshop July 23 at the Best Western in Puyallup.
The budget session was originally scheduled for two days, but the council elected to work through lunch and extend the first session to wrap-up the meeting in one day.
This is the first year the city will be developing a two-year budget. City staff presented the health of the city’s finances and, with the council’s blessing, will be creating budget procedures that mirror a conservative expectation of incoming funding for city services and projects.
Some of the values the city has set for how it operates include an emphasis on good customer service, maintaining trust and integrity with residents, encouraging staff creativity, establishing partnerships on projects and the addition of being environmental stewards.
They discussed using a pay-as-you-go method for funding projects and only incurring debt when the benefit is greater than the expense.
Any revenue in the general funds reserve that exceeds the 12 percent city reserve will be transferred into a capital project fund at the end of the biennium to pay for scheduled projects.
They modified the a distribution element of the hotel motel tax to allocate 20 percent of funds accrued for parking improvements that help encourage tourism in the city.
Transportation needs was a hot topic and the council was briefed on on-going efforts and partnerships to address parking needs in the city, specifically downtown.
The city council discussed upcoming annexations and that future annexations should be self supporting with expenditures matching incoming revenue.
The council also passed a motion in support of City Manager Gary McLean and city staff to encourage their efforts in creating a successful Puyallup.
After concluding the meeting, Puyallup City Council members shared their thoughts on what came and out of the meeting and how they thought it went. These are responses from every council member except Council members Mike Deal and Rick Hansen, who did not respond to inquiries by the time of publication.
Tami Brouillett
“Just a few thoughts of the Biennial Budget Workshop; Staff and council worked very well together. Our finance director (Cliff Craig) explained every topic in great detail and was very precise. Puyallup is lucky to have Cliff working for us.
“As for us receiving notice of the workshop, this was the date that was used for the last four or five years. The location was chosen over the last couple of months. We had only city staff and Central Pierce members attend.
“It does not appear that having the workshop held in the city was a very important factor to our community. We had only one citizen (Bud) attend the workshop and he has regularly attended the workshops that have been held outside the city in the past.
“The council was able to provide direction to the staff to move forward on many topics and I look forward to what they will bring back for the October budget workshop.
“My only concerns from the workshop relate to the cost of the possible merger with Central Pierce (Fire and Rescue) and the cost to televise council meetings. For the merger, the financial information keeps changing every time we discuss the topic. This inconsistency is very concerning. The latest info from the workshop indicated Central Pierce now wants $2 million more to take over our department and provide fire service to Puyallup then they have previously indicated they need. This is a significant increase over the amount the city is currently funding the department at and there are also questions about some staff losing their positions. It appears this is a cost that would be passed on to the tax payers/citizens. I look forward to the Citizens Committee looking over all the options related to the merger, I only hope there is enough time for them to do so in a thorough manner before the November election. I hope this is a topic you will be taking a close look at as well, I’m sure it would be an interesting story.
“As for televising the council meetings, we were provided several options, all of which I believe is excessive and I believe we have other, more important priorities that our limited funds should go for.”
George Dill
“Given that this was the initial budget workshop it went very well. The finance director, Cliff Craig, presented excellent financial background material so council could make decisions and give direction to the city manager and staff. Notice of location was not done well in my opinion, only one citizen attended. I would have preferred that it was held in a city facility, the current council chambers would have been satisfactory and would have been more cost effective. I will never support going out of town. Remember it’s the quality of the product that is important not where it was produced.
“The quality of the retreat material and working through lunch allowed council to complete the workshop in just the single day, however future budget workshops will probably take longer as they will require more specific decisions and probably more discussion.
“How to get more citizens out is a good question.”
John Knutsen
“Wednesday, July 23, we held a budget workshop approximately one mile from downtown.
“I observed two budget workshops but this is my first as a participant.
“My views are as follows. Positives: New Finance Director Cliff Craig gave a professional, constructive presentation. For the first time all seven council members participated in policy and direction. The council worked on some upcoming problems.
“Negatives: One day was not enough. The meeting was publicized, but not the time or location. One citizen attended. Money spent on a meeting room when the city has several. The council was given the agenda the day before. Citizens, groups, the press, had little or no notice as to when items would be discussed. The second day’s cancellation did not give enough notice as to items moved to Wednesday. The mayor and the city administration responded by saying ‘We gave legal notice.’ This is not enough. It should be publicized a week before the meeting and the topics need to be stated clearly.
“As a participant I felt the meeting was done in a manner that brought minimal attention to the meeting. I felt uncomfortable meeting in a room with only one citizen in attendance. I had to call the fire union to let them know their topic had been moved ahead to Wednesday. A clear effort to prevent televising causes me to repeat ‘All council meetings need to be in front of as many citizens as possible and as bright a light as possible.’ If not for Mr. Craig’s presentation – A waste of my time.”
Don Malloy
“The No. 1 priority has to be that we have to operate within our means. We have to be very careful with the public’s funds...
“I think we have to be very careful in living within our means. There’s a great deal of uncertainty in the economy right now and that has to be our number one priority
“We have to give a priority to essential services that the public expects.
“In my mind, those are the things the public needs but can’t provide themselves.
“Outside of that there’s a real problem with flooding downtown and we’re trying to establish a long term solution and it’s going to cost a lot of money to solve.
“One of the things we are working on and we are making real progress on is that we need to provide some relief to Meridian. There are three major projects that help that; first on 9th and 94th, second the extension of 39th street were it’s going to go around Borders Books and connect over by Shaw Road. We’re on track to work on that and the third one is the Shaw Road extension over the railroad tracks to Main Street so people can get to (State Route) 410.
“.....There’s a lot of things in this community that the people value. They value our library, they value our parks and they value our services.
“And tied to each one of those things is a dollar sign.
“In my opinion it was the most well prepared pre-budget meeting I’ve gone to since I’ve been on the council.
“And I’ll credit (City Manager) Gary McLean and Finance Director Cliff Craig for that.
“Rather than dealing with generalities we did go into specifics. So we got some valuable insight and information....
“I think budget meetings need to be well organized and this was well organized and we accomplished what we needed to all in one day.
“We got right down to the meat of the information and made some really good decisions.
“As far as attendance we did have one citizen show up and it was well publicized.
“I’ll tell you how you get a lot of people involved in government — you make people angry.
“Maybe it’s an indication that people have a degree of confidence in their government, they have a degree of confidence in their council and they have a degree of confidence in what is going on.”
Kathy Turner
“This budget workshop was to give policy direction to staff to begin the process of building the budget. Since this is our first biennial budget an understanding of the process and the changes was very important.
“The information and process was very clear and the analysis we received and the conservative direction we gave is a building block for staff to bring forward a balanced visionary biennial budget.”
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