The city of Tulsa’s upcoming budget is starting from behind with a $5 million gap between expected revenues and anticipated expenses next year, officials said.
“We have less revenue and more expense,” Finance Director Mike Kier said. “It’s a lot of money.”
Kier said the projected gap between revenue and expenses in the city’s general fund is especially precarious after a decade of more cuts than growth. In years past, an extra $5 million would have been easier to trim, he said.
The general fund, primarily fueled by sales tax, pays for day-to-day expenses of operating city departments, including salary.
“People get to a point where they can’t chip away expenses here and there,” Kier said.
Next year’s budget is still being formulated, but as the new fiscal year draws closer, the city’s position has become clearer.
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When the city adopted its current budget last year, officials laid out a financial plan for next year based on “virtually flat” revenue. But revenue has performed worse than expected — causing predictions to adjust downward, Kier said.
The city’s administration is in the thick of preparing next year’s budget, with a draft of it due in April.
“There’s nothing at this point that’s fixed,” Kier said.
Mayor G.T. Bynum, who has been meeting with Kier three days a week to discuss the budget, said his office is looking at ways to raise revenue by evaluating services the city provides for free.
“Are there things that users should be paying for that the city is subsidizing?” Bynum said. “We want to address that subsidization.”
And if revenue can’t keep up with expenses, Bynum said employees will again have to be asked to do more with less.
“The all-encompassing focus of my administration is to get Tulsa growing again,” Bynum said. “That’s not just a throwaway line. That’s the fundamental problem we have. If you have a business and your costs go up every year but your customer base never grows and you never raise prices, you go out of business.”
Kier said the city’s revenue has had a downward trend for more than a decade.
Average growth has been 1.1 percent for the past 15 years, but inflation alone has increased costs by 2.3 percent in that time period, Kier said.
Following years of cuts, the departments are already so lean that they don’t know where to look to make up next year’s $5 million gap.
“It’s just much tougher for any department in the organization to pull back $5 million,” Kier said. “They’re asking what we would like to shut down.”
Kier said the situation could be worse.
“You don’t know what awful is yet,” Kier said. “Oftentimes these are a matter of perspective. I’m pretty sure when we laid off 186 officers in 2010, that was some kind of awful.”
