AUBURN — Councilors steered away from most staff layoffs Monday night as they approved their fiscal year 2014-15 budget, but they adopted a host of amendments and trimmed proposed spending significantly.
Finance Director Jill Eastman said she needed until Tuesday morning to calculate what all the cuts would mean for the proposed budget and where the city’s property tax rate would settle.
City Manager Clinton Deschene had proposed $1.8 million in cuts to his original draft budget that would have called for a tax rate increase of a 25 cents per $1,000 of property value.
“And they took most of the cuts he proposed,” Eastman said. “Now, it’s just a matter of figuring it all out.”
Deschene’s proposal for $335,000 in staffing cuts across the city made councilors uneasy. They spent nearly 90 minutes in a closed-door executive session discussing the impact those cuts would have.
When it came time to approve them, councilors said they could support smaller cuts totaling $178,000 that would result in staff reductions through attrition — not replacing city staffers who retire or resign.
Deschene said he’d have to work on how those cuts would be spread out, but said the decision should dispel fears of staff layoffs.
“They’ve given me some room to maneuver and slow down the reductions,” Deschene said. “I have a bottom line to work toward and I will do it without layoffs if I can. If I have to make more cuts, I will.”
Deschene said he’d brief councilors on the cuts before their next meeting June 2. He won’t make staff cuts public until after the council has adopted a final budget.
“There is no way I can,” he said. “There are too many personnel matters to consider, even considering it’s just attrition.”
Councilors also agreed to create a city ambulance service through the Fire Department. It includes $635,468 in new costs but should give the city $987,000 in new revenue.
Councilors also voted to preserve the twice monthly curbside recycling collections as they are operated now, with a call for service expansions by 2015.
Councilors agreed to several other cuts, reducing budgets in the Fire Department by $73,000, eliminating shared animal control with Lewiston, reducing police equipment and vehicles, cutting staff training, ending plans to purchase City Council computers and reducing Recreation Department spending.
“I reluctantly advocate on behalf of this amendment,” Councilor Adam Lee said. “It gets us to a budget goal. It decreases, perhaps, more than it should. But it gets us to a goal.”
They also cut shared spending with Lewiston for the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport, the Lewiston-Auburn Transit Committee and LA 911, reduced capital spending and called for 2 percent cost-of-living increases for staff.
Councilor Tizz Crowley also called for ending Auburn’s funding for L/A Arts specifically, creating a new Arts and Culture budget line that can be allocated to that group but must be spent within Auburn’s city limits.
Mayor Jonathan LaBonte said he assumes councilors are not finished trimming the budget.
“I expect once staff has run the numbers and in advance of the June 2 meeting, we will schedule a workshop to see where we might be and get a lay of the land,” LaBonte said. “The council will be able to make further amendments.”
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