Council Passes $92.8M Budget

The City Council passed a fiscal year 2014 municipal budget of more than $92.8 million at City Hall Monday night that is expected to increase the local property tax rate by 36 cents and that tax increase could have been significantly lower if attempts to cut more than $630,000 additional dollars succeeded.

The new city tax rate will be $17.91 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, which City Manager John Bohenko said represents a 2.05 percent increase over this year's budget.

City Councilors Brad Lown and Esther Kennedy wanted to cut the budget further to lower the new tax rate.

Lown made a motion to cut the Portsmouth Police and Portsmouth Fire deparment budgets by 1 percent, or more than $166,000. Instead of focusing on making the departments cut their overtime budgets, Lown believed they could find the spending reductions elsewhere.

He called the use of overtime, which he said amounts to $1.1 million between the two departments, “entrenched” and “institutionalized.” He also said he attempted to reduce overtime for the two departments when he last sat on the City Council 12 years ago.

Lown said excessive overtime drives up the city's retirement system costs and does not give city taxpayers an additional public safety. “This is essentially a contractual problem that arises out of the union contract,” he added.

“I am proposing this now to give the taxpayers a break rather than having to wait another 10 years,” he said.

If approved, the 1 percent reduction would have totaled about $91,275 for the police department budget and $75,125 for the fire department budget.

While Kennedy and City Councilor Jack Thorsen supported Lown's motion, it was not enough to pass. It failed by a vote of 3-6.

Kennedy then made a motion to cut $470,477 from the budget and let Bohenko decide where to make those cuts. If passed, Kennedy said the reduction would amount to a 2 percent decrease.

Thorsen supported her motion because he said he is always looking for ways to cut property taxes. "We have a fat budget mentality as opposed to a lean budget mentality. When you have a fat budget mentality you accumulate and we have been accumulating for a long time," he said.

Assistant Mayor Robert Lister disagreed. "I don't believe we have a budget that has a lot of fat in it."

Kennedy's motion failed by a vote of 2-7.