This morning's Standard-Examiner reports that our big-spending mayor has suddenly absorbed a dose of economic reality, and ordered city department heads to slash city budgets by 4%:
OGDEN — Mayor Matthew Godfrey has ordered city departments to freeze general fund spending by 4 percent to cover a projected sales tax revenue shortfall spurred by a slumping national economy.Over the course of the last 8 years Boss Godfrey has been a one-trick pony, borrowing and spending like a madman, relentlessly fueling his megalomaniacal obsession to make over Ogden City into one giant kiddie amusement park.
The measure is expected to cut about $2 million from the city’s $51 million fiscal 2009 general fund budget, Godfrey said.
“Cities are the first to be hit in this kind of economic climate,” he said, explaining the reason for the spending freeze.
“ The first thing people do is stop shopping. We want to make sure precautions are taken to carefully save sales tax revenue.”
Based on early economic indicators, Ogden expected to receive about $15.2 million in sales tax revenue during fiscal 2009, which ends June 30, but is now projecting it will get only about $13.2 million, said Mark Johnson, the city’s management services director. [...].
Department heads in the city have discretion in determining how to freeze general fund spending within their individual budgets, Johnson said.
But now that the city is in a forced frugality mode, the question arises: What happens next? Now that Godfrey has made it clear that he'll "scrounge up every dime he can from every piggy bank on every desk or wallet of every worker for the city as well as every city tax payer," (source) what happens to his ongoing signature pet projects?
As recently as September 10 of this year, Godfrey's spokesmen were urging the Ogden RDA to zero out its bank account, for piecemeal acquisitions of unacquired properties in the languishing River Project area.
And then there's the Ice Tower... and the Velodrome... and the Junction Money Pit (which has already soaked up at least $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars beyond Godfrey's original projections - with no end in sight,) and the whole array of other hare-brained plots and schemes that rattle around the Godfrey brain, and keep the little feller scheming late into the night.
As the the government of Emerald City hunkers down to weather the percipient 2008 recession -- and trims budgets beyond the bare bone -- will the Godfrey and his economic development "A" Team follow suit and lead by example? Or... is the belt-tightening to which Godfrey refers restricted to the "little people?"
Who will be the first to speak up about this?
