This was the showcase moment for which Lamont Ewell, Interim City Manager, was hired — to bridge the gap between old and new city managers.
When future historians look back on Culver City’s golden days, Mr. Ewell’s brilliant 45-minute delineation last night of the budget for the new fiscal year will be the Oscar winner for this decade, a very unusual concept.
It was not merely his extraordinary mastery of the hundreds of nuances buried within the arcane corners of the budget that distinguished him.
Rather, he held Council Chambers spellbound because he combined this talent with a rare gift for compellingly communicating algebraic complexities to a relatively unlettered audience.
With a dense and lengthy script before him, he had so thoroughly conquered all of the concepts that he only glancingly referred to the text.
With disappointing news encrypted in practically every line, he made sour-tasting medicine go down so soothingly the temptation was to ask for more.
As if he were telling Tuesday night Bedtime Stories at the Julian Dixon Library, Mr. Ewell, seemingly effortlessly but with commanding clarity, related the sad but sensible, and by now commonplace, tale of Culver City’s severe budget deficit.
The Numbers Game
In navigating a path through the universal financial disaster of the last 2½ years to explain the daunting hometown bad news, he placed the $158.9 million overall budget (16 percent smaller than last year), with an original $7.5 million deficit, into an accessible context.
Mr. Ewell proposed a two-year action plan roadmap that he said would close this year’s gap and also next fiscal year’s projected $2 million deficit.
The belt-cinching covers a complexity that accents a subtraction of 60 personnel positions, 10 percent of the workforce, most of which already has been achieved, borrowing from the Reserve Fund, indeed permanently reducing the size of the Reserve Fund, and renegotiating agreements with the city’s six labor unions in quest of givebacks.
“While this is a difficult budget,” Mr. Ewell said, “core services to the community are being preserved, and our finances should be stabilized over a two-year period.”
One of Mr. Ewell’s suggested stabilizers is raising the hotel tax, the transient occupancy tax, from 12 percent, below many comparable communities, he said, to 14 percent.
Unpleasant Reality
This seemed to spark a cringe, but nothing more, from members of the City Council.
“This is not an easy budget,” Mr. Ewell said, “but it is truly a necessary budget. Prudent short-term and long-term management of the public resources we are entrusted with is one of our most basic duties as public servants.”
Council members are not rubber stamps, but they generally endorsed Mr. Ewell’s entire package with one notable exception.
All across the dais, they objected to the City Manager’s suggestion that the Reserve Fund be reduced from 30 percent of General Fund expenditures to 20 percent, as a way of freeing up money that is just parked.
Mr. Ewell is halfway through his temporary four-month gig, and one of his deficit-reducing schemes is to renegotiate agreements with the six labor unions. Undeniably, that will save jobs — but nobody today was brave enough to predict up or down on givebacks.
“Prudent management often involves making difficult decisions,” Mr. Ewell said. “The city has faced economic downturns in the past, and it will face them in the future.
“Responding to them appropriately is our duty. I believe this proposed budget and the proposed action plan address the structural operational deficit over a two-year period. This approach also reduces the short-term impact on our residents, businesses and visitors.
“Success of this and future budgets will depend on the ability of the city to further reduce operational costs in fiscal year 2011-2012 and beyond to keep them in line with available revenues.”
The most telling unscripted moment came when new Councilman Jeff Cooper suggested that some pain at City Hall could be spared if the entire staff agreed to a temporary pay cut.
Temporary won’t work, Mr. Ewell said. The present state of sagging revenue and rising expenses is the permanent pattern for city governments. Volatility, he warned, is the new norm.
