Hyattsville FY14 Budget Approved After Objections

During a Thursday evening special session, the Hyattsville City Council avoided a shutdown of the city government, voting 9-1 to approve a budget with less than three days until the start of the next fiscal year.

"I'm glad it passed, and hopefully we can move on to some other issues now that we need to be addressing," said Jerry Schiro, Hyattsville city administrator, in an interview after the meeting. 

The budget lays out $14.4 million in projected general fund revenues for the city and $13.8 million in general fund expenditures. But $1.7 million in transfers out of the general fund to the capital projects and debt service funds mean that the city is left with a $1.1 million general fund shortfall. That shortfall will be paid out of the city's $8.4 million reserve fund.

Budget deliberations during last night's meeting were marked by strong words from some city council members angry that city treasurer Elaine Stookey did not combine two related public works projects, the Crittenden Street and 40th Place street rehabilitation and the construction of a new Melrose Access trailhead connecting Crittenden Street to Magruder Park, per the terms of a resolution introduced from the dais and approved by the city council during a special session held last week.

Stookey said that the two projects needed to remain separate on paper for the purposes of record keeping. The city has a contractual agreement, dating back to 2009, with the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission to construct a new Melrose Access trailhead.

"There is an agreement with park and planning that the city will do that project, that we will provide them with accounting for that project and keep them informed as to what we are doing," said Stookey in an interview after Thursday's meeting. "In my head, the project had to be kept separate because we had contractual obligations that went along with that project, which had been funded since 2009."

While the city plans on using the same contractor for both projects, as well as embarking on both projects at roughly the same time, Stookey said combining them under one heading could cause problems with audits down the road. 

"You wouldn't be able to cleanly tell that you've done it, these are the costs that we paid, here's how we did it," said Stookey. "The timing has worked out so that we can do them both with mobilizing a contractor once."

Mayor Marc Tartaro, the lone vote against the budget measure, blamed the confusion over the matter on the fact that the motion combining the two projects was introduced and passed by the city council in one night.

"If staff had an opportunity to look at it, probably some of this misunderstanding wouldn't have happened," said Tartaro after the meeting. "This budget process has stretched both only the treasurer, but all city staff, to the breaking point."

But Council Member Bart Lawrence (Ward 1) said that it was Tartaro's delay in producing a complete budget document which put city elected leaders and staff under a time crunch. 

"The whole process led to where we are at," said Lawrence. "I trust Ms. Stookey, I believe her, but ultimately this is the result of a process that the council has been put under."

The city council also tabled a motion to revise the city's retiree health care benefit plan until their next scheduled meeting on July 15. But the budget approved last night was constructed around a proposed "placeholder" retiree health care plan which would save the city more than $500,000 if officially adopted within the next few weeks.