City '05 budget does little

to restore previous cuts

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- Even though the city's 2005 budget, at $13,673,066, is about $1.3 million higher than this year's budget, it's basically a maintenance type budget with little or no restoration of the last two rounds of budget cuts, City Manager Brian Gramentz reports.

The Park and Recreation Department's budget is an excellent example of that, Gramentz and Park and Rec Director Dave Bechtold agree.

Looking at the numbers, it appears the department is getting about $400,000 more than this year -- which would seem to allow for a little healing of huge cuts made in 2003 and 2004.

"Actually, most of the increase is the result of our having to put $374,000 into the budget for replacing an aging air changer system in the Family Recreation Center," Gramentz said.

"It's really getting old, and we need a new system that will prevent a build-up of chlorine over the indoor swimming pool."

Because Vogel Arena's ice rink supplied the building's air conditioning, the air changing system will require an air conditioning unit.

"There's also $30,000 in the capital outlay fund for new water slides which will replace some aging diving boards," Bechtold added.

Otherwise, the increases basically boil down to covering wage hikes and ever-increasing medical insurance costs.

"If memory serves correctly, there's roughly $30,000 in there for programming which was basically where most of the cuts came from. These were part-time jobs (involving) the Puppet Wagon, the arts and crafts kind of stuff that we would do through Park and Recreation," Gramentz continued.

"So, if you don't bring those programs back, you don't need the labor. Now, we've got $30,000 in there, we probably spent around $14,000 this year in programming so we do plan on bringing some programming back which then will, in turn, require us to hire a few part-timers. We're not cutting any more, and when there's available funds, we're going to try to bring some of those quality-of-life items back to the community that everybody would like to see. Those, unfortunately, we were unable to fund for two years," Gramentz said.

While the budget of the Public Library will increase about $31,000, to $565,648, it's another case of trying to maintain the status quo, Gramentz said. When you subtract about $9,000 for wage increases, over $5,000 for medical insurance coverage, it doesn't leave much room for increases in other areas.

However, the budget for buying books is being increased about $4,000 to $36,000. That's still well short of the $43,226 budgeted in 2002 and the $40,368 in 2003. From there, the changes drop to a thousand here and a few hundred dollars there.

Meanwhile, the departments that are considered necessities in operating city government will see some increases.

The Police Department gets a $110,000 boost to $1,876,980.

"We need to continue our program of vehicle replacement, and, of course, we're adding a second investigator," Gramentz said.

The Fire Department's budget will increase nearly $45,000 over 2004 while the Street Department will get an increase of $138,812 to help the department keep up with street patching that needs to be done, Gramentz said.

And you can't forget debt service. That's a big item in the budget. At $2,551,248, debt service in 2005 will be nearly $500,000 more than this year.

Ron Larsen can be reached at rlarsen@nujournal.com.