Few cuts favored in final budget workshop

More volunteerism, efficiency audits of city departments and even higher taxes were all among the suggestions offered Thursday during the third and final installment of an intensive community budget workshop organized this month by the city.

During the culminating event of the process, participants were broken up into small clusters and given stickers to use to signal their group’s assessment of 55 different line items in the city budget.

Each item, posted on large sheets of paper in the meeting room at the James River Conference Center, had four options listed next to it:

- Don’t Touch

- Reduce Cost or Service Levels

- Nice to Have

- Stop Doing It

Participants, about 60 in all, used the round stickers to convey their rating of each item. The final result was a mass of multi-colored dots next to the first two categories, but only a smattering under the second two.

Of more than 400 stickers posted, only 13 were applied under the Stop Doing It category.

“This is part of the struggle we face when we’re building a community,” City Manager Kimball Payne said to the group, noting the lopsided pattern. “… Hopefully, discussions like these make us realize that we’re all in this together.”

City officials will use the recommendations from Thursday to inform their budget decisions next year. This is the first time the city has launched such an intensive and early effort to seek community feedback on this topic. City Council itself won’t begin its next budget deliberations until March.

Organizers plan to hold a similar, albeit condensed, version of the budget workshop for city employees beginning next week. All recommendations received through these programs will be compiled into a report and presented during a public event, possibly in January.

Officials also plan to establish a feedback function on the city Web site to allow people to continue submitting comments and ideas.

Participants in the community workshop said they found the process educational, particularly when it came to understanding how difficult and frustrating the budget process can be.

“I do not envy them,” Dan Murphy, a retired college administrator, said of the city leaders. “… It’s pretty clear that we want it all, but we’re not willing to pay for it.”