Nine days and counting.
In just over a week, Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown will have to present his fiscal year 2013 budget to the City Council — and after the Independence Day holiday, the budget office still was looking to fill a hole of at least $40 million.
"It's crunch time," Chief Financial Officer Ronnie Belton said Tuesday before the holiday, which he spent in the office.
Staffing cuts are one of the key ideas being considered, with the elimination of positions in the police and fire departments, as well as throughout government, a possibility.
As he did last year, Brown has promised he will not raise taxes or fees, making the balancing act more difficult.
Revenue is down around $45 million, and some unavoidable issues are pushing expenses up. Chief among them: an increase in pension costs that is adding about $50 million to the budget.
That increase, revealed in a report released last week, was $20 million or so higher than budget planners had anticipated, tossing a wrench into their work. The week before the report came out, planners had gotten the gap between revenue and expenditures down to $44 million, only to see it jump to at least $65.7 million when the higher figure was included.
But workers have been whittling away at that number.
As of Monday morning, an official budget report showed a $50.1 million gap in the almost $1 billion budget, with cuts to public works, housing and neighborhoods, and planning and development figured in.
By Tuesday, that number was down in the $40 million range, Belton said, where it still hovered Thursday. Nothing is yet set in stone, he added, with "everything on the table" when it comes to cuts.
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