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Biennial budget needs changes

By Avani Nadkarni/of The Herald

The Sumner City Council approved a biennial budget earlier this year — but like all budgets, Sumner’s needs a midterm tweaking.

“This is not a surprise to us,” Deputy City Administrator Diane Supler told the council. “We knew we’d have to do a lot of adjustments.”

The adjustments, mainly done to take the rocky economy into consideration, will go through a public hearing process at the council’s Nov. 16 meeting before council approves them in early December.

The largest revenue reductions were from the budget’s general fund, which was reduced by $1 million, $900,000 of which were due to decreasing sales tax, said Supler. Sales tax decreased $1.7 million in the past year, mostly due to the fact that state law now mandates that the tax is collected in the city in which the sale is completed, not where it originated. Due to the numerous Sumner businesses that deliver, especially in the industrial area, the city lost a significant amount of sales tax revenue.

“We’re losing out on those transactions,” Supler explained.

In fact, Sumner’s sales tax revenue decline, 28 percent, eclipses most other East Pierce cities, including Bonney Lake, which has a 14.5 percent decline and Puyallup, which saw a 10.6 percent decline. Edgewood saw a 31 percent decline.

“When we looked at Sumner, the number is significant,” Supler said. “But there are many other cities that are having the same problem.”

Another piece of the general fund reductions is construction: Sumner saw a 30.5 percent reduction in land use and building permits from 2008. Conversely, Supler said, Bonney Lake has seen “a whole bunch of development,” and Puyallup saw the large expansion of MultiCare Good Samaritan Hospital.

Other smaller revenue reductions included salary and benefit costs of employees, reduction of street funds and capital project funds and miscellaneous grant funds, such as the several grants the police department received in 2009.

The public will get a chance to have their say on Nov. 16 before the council has to make a decision, but Supler wanted to stress that the city’s priority is having the least impact on employees and residents. To date, only one position was eliminated and three have been left vacant and, she said, many employees have volunteered to scale back so jobs won’t be cut.

“Employees have been giving back wonderfully in many, many ways,” Supler said. “(But) it’s not a rosy or optimistic — if things get worse, we’ll have to ... have another conversation with council.”