Board of Aldermen — 4/11/17 Page 22
Getting back to this ordinance, ya, it creates a little room under the cap. And thank goodness that it does
because you know what? The taxpayers would get jipped if it didn’t’ because they would be paying more
money for less services. That’s not right, and | will never support a budget, not in this economy, that says to
people give me a little bit more but I’m not going to give back to you what you’re paying me extra.
Alderman Siegel
Excess money is not because we overtax people. It’s because we haven't spent money. We have positions
that become unfilled because people leave. That salary money accumulates, and it is leftover. There’s a
number of reasons why we have leftover money. It’s not because we overtax people. | also want to say that
while the economy may be good for some people, there are people on fixed income that the ups and downs of
the economy are irrelevant. We should all be sensitive to that. | respect my colleague Alderman Clemons’
comments, but just want to add a little balance.
The point | want to make is again for those people who want to say we'll just have to go through a process, |
actually did go through a process at one point. We had a piece of legislation that took earmarked money that
was specifically set aside to deal with our pension issue. What it wanted to do was put it into an expendable
trust fund and use that money to help us in the situation we’re in right now. That money, which was
earmarked, would have had zero effect on the taxpayer. It wasn’t additional money coming out of taxpayer’s
pocket, it wasn’t going to be replenished. It was specifically earmarked, in fact bond counsel knew it was
earmarked so it wouldn’t have affected our bond rating either. It was earmarked for that purpose. This board
voted no on that. People had their reasons, they wanted to see what would happen down the road. Let’s see
if we can tighten our belt and maybe not do that. But that option was shut down. That doesn’t exist. We took
that one off the table. That to me was process. That was at least myself and some other people that are
creative in the mayor’s office thinking about what we could do. Again, | want to say: what’s the solution,
everyone? You tell me. I’ve come up with some. They got shot down. Any new ideas? | don’t see them.
| think it’s incumbent if you say this isn’t acceptable, | don’t want this to happen, you always want to have an
alternative. In my company when people come up to me and they want to say | don’t want to do this, alright.
Fine. What’s your alternative? That’s how we deal with things in real life. Tell me what you do want to do to
help solve the problem. So, | would urge that. Thank you.
Alderman Moriarty
It’s worth noting that there was, by example, a union salary contract that grew by 20 percent over a course of
three years that passed by this Board recently. In fact it did include pension costs, but the bottom line grew by
20 percent over three years. From the day | was elected on this Board six years ago, it was time after time the
majority of the board chose to ignore the warnings that | made that we can’t afford this; that this was going to
come back and haunt us. And, here we are today. | take great exception to the assertion that the problem that
we have before us is outside of our control and is because of the spending cap. That is not true.
We knew this was coming. We could have planned for it. We chose not to. Yet at the same time, many
people, my colleagues, have made, the Mayor in particular, has made very persuasive arguments for why we
need to continue spending money. | encourage you to make those persuasive arguments and abide by the
Charter and get ten votes to move money outside the budget as the Charter states. Basically, you override the
spending cap. You just got to bond, a massive $37.5 million bond, with 13 votes. What makes you believe
that you can’t possible get ten votes to do what you want? | think that’s the honorable thing to do to approach
this properly.
A month or so ago it was taboo it seemed to even admit that what we are doing, O-17-031 is a spending cap
end-around. People weren’t going to admit to the public that it was a spending cap end around. | simply
wanted everybody to know, | wanted the Mayor to know, | wanted people who are supporting this to know that
the public knows this is a spending cap end around. But we sure made a lot of progress in the sense that that
has no effect on anybody. Alderman Clemons has said from the get go, | respect you for that, your position
