Budget
Testimony of The Rockville Community Coalition
January 30, 2012
Good evening,
My name is Roald Schrack. I live at 13 Farsta Ct.
I speak tonight for the budget subcommittee of the Rockville Community
Coalition - a 501C4 organization registered with the state of Maryland.
This must be a very preliminary review because you released your
preliminary estimates only last week. We appreciate the extra efforts
made to add new layers of public disclosure for citizen input, but we
might suggest that a week is somewhat short for even the most
rudimentary response.
Nevertheless there are several items that are obvious points of
interest. The first is the very disquieting observation that this year,
for the first time in Rockville history our taxable real estate value
has declined. Even more disquieting is the fact that next January the
second half of Rockville will have it’s triennial
reassessment . There is every reason to believe that it will further
lower our assessable base by an amount similar to this year’s
loss of $2M in revenue.
Looking for the silver lining, one learns from the Real Estate website
Zillow that Rockville, alone among all neighboring jurisdictions had a
2% positive uptick in 2011 in home prices. Let us hope that we have hit
bottom, and the assessments 3 years hence will again be upward bound.
There are some helpful items to note. We no longer have the golf course
or the parking garage to drag down the budget, and the completion of
the Choice Hotels building will help our assessable base. The
preliminary revenue and expenditure estimates given last week do not
look as bad as one might have expected and even seem to balance out.
We applaud the opportunity for the members of the Mayor and Council to
make some of their priorities clear before the framework of the draft
budget document is fleshed out. The first 11 survey questions, the
budget foundation items, do look like significant policy questions that
can and should help determine the shape of the final budget documents.
But we question the value of response to most of the 158 items that
follow these initial core priorities. Does the Mayor and Council think
their opinion of support or lack of it for these 158 items is based on
more than prejudice when they have not had a chance to see the many
pages of project evaluations for the past year that the budget document
contains? The current document is a far cry from the line item budgets
that were used originally. In those documents only revenues and
expenditures were noted with no description of goals or accomplishments
and efficiencies obtained. We wish we had greater assurance that budget
decisions were being made on a factual basis.
The city of Rockville is a corporation with about 500 skilled employees
who do an excellent job. At least 95% of the budget document is
preordained by the requirements of the job. The Mayor and Council are
to set policy and the effect of those policies is then implemented by
the City Manager. The City Manager has the authority to transfer money
within a given fund. It is misleading to suggest that the
Mayor and Council should indicate preferences on the 158 items which
have the appearance if not the reality of extensive micro management
and interference with the task of the City Manager.
We will follow with interest the development of the FY13 budget and
hope to see you again when the draft budget appears.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Budget Testimony 1