They questioned how the city’s budget decisions are made, and Fairchild said he thinks city administration is not adequately gathering and using commissioners’ input to determine priorities.
“I don’t believe we’re hitting the mark here in regards to the commission priorities,” Turner-Sloss said.
Last month, the city commission approved a temporary 2023 budget, but not on the first try after Commissioners Turner-Sloss and Fairchild said they would not vote for the city manager’s recommended budget. The pair said they had unresolved concerns and that the recommended budget did not contain funding for some of the investments they support.
The Dayton City Commission has five members and it only needs a majority (three members) to pass a budget ordinance. Dayton Mayor Jeffrey Mims Jr. and Commissioners Chris Shaw and Matt Joseph wanted to approve the city manager’s recommended budget in December.
The city needed to pass the budget ordinance as an emergency to take effect immediately, instead of in 30 days. Emergency ordinances require yes votes from four out of five commission members.
The city commission eventually approved 2023 budget legislation as an emergency, after it was announced that $1 million would be moved to support youth development. Fairchild and Turner-Sloss said this was a priority of theirs.
The city held a public hearing last week about the proposed 2023 annual appropriation that approves spending for the full year. The city has scheduled a first reading of the ordinance on Feb. 15 and the second reading a week later.
Under Ohio Revised Code, Dayton must have an approved appropriation by April 1 to avoid losing the legal authority to make expenditures, said Monica Jones, Dayton’s director of procurement, management and budget.
During the public hearing, Turner-Sloss said the city’s budget process is not transparent, and she thinks the city needs a better system for scoring and ranking spending on projects and programming, by how they satisfy commission priorities.
She questioned how department directors determine what funding is needed to fulfill commission priorities and how those priorities are weighed against other considerations.
Turner-Sloss said the city should look at using software or some other method to better evaluate proposed spending plans. .
“I have areas of concern in the budget that have not been addressed,” Turner-Sloss said.
Mims said the budget isn’t perfect because there’s not enough money for some things the city would like to fund. But he said it does fund many important investments.
Fairchild said he thinks the city administration is making important budget decisions without adequately consulting members of the commission.
As an example, he said the city originally indicated it would spend $15.8 million of its $138 million in federal COVID relief funds on demolition.
But without notice or explanation the city later said it would spend $12.4 million on demolition and $3.4 million on historic stabilization and brush and blight removal, Fairchild said.
Fairchild said this means the city will tear down fewer properties using its federal COVID funds than originally promised.
Farichild said he may have supported shifting some of the city’s COVID rescue dollars that have been set aside for other purposes to demolition.
Dickstein said the Dayton Recovery Plan — the city’s spending plan for its federal COVID funds — always called for demolition funding to be spent this way.
She said she may have miscommunicated how much would be spent specifically on demolition back when the Dayton Recovery Plan was discussed in late 2021.
The city plans to put money from some of its other funding sources toward demolition.
Dickstein said it sounds like the city commission might benefit from meeting and hashing out their priorities together to come up with policy direction to share with city administration.
“We put together the recommendations ... but we put it together and put it before you,” she said. “We do our very best to put the best thing forward, but then we rely on input collectively — collective direction — from the commission body, with regards to the policy direction.”
Fairchild said the city’s budget process has not given commissioners adequate time to digest the city manager’s spending recommendations and propose changes.
Dickstein said the city is looking to restructure the budget process to try to give commissioners additional time to evaluate recommendations.
Fairchild and Turner-Sloss this week also said they are still worried that the Human Relations Council is not being given the resources it needs to be effective.
The two commissioners also said they are concerned about fire department staffing levels, which have led to Station 10 in West Dayton being out of service most of the time.
Turner-Sloss said she also does not understand why the city isn’t funding more positions when it has a problem with staffing shortages.
Fairchild said he would like the city to provide the commission with a list of city funding requests that were not included in the budget. Turner-Sloss said she’d like to see departments’ “wish lists” that were drafted before city administration refined budget recommendations.
City Manager Dickstein said department directors and their staff develop draft budgets using a variety of “inputs,” including past spending levels, key performance indicators, community feedback, the commission’s identified priorities, plus personnel, contracts and materials costs.
The city manager said the budget process is thorough and comprehensive and considers organizational and community inputs, as well city commission priorities.
In response to other issues raised, Dickstein said the Human Relations Council saw a 25% increase in staffing capacity in 2022.
She also said the city has launched a pilot program that deploys an ambulance with emergency medical technicians aboard that hopefully will help address some of the staffing challenges facing the fire department.
Dickstein said Dayton has staffing capacity issues that are related to a tight labor market, but the city is not funding some requested positions because the city’s expenses are rising faster than revenues.
City Commissioner Chris Shaw said the city must make tough budget decisions since there is not a “money tree” in front of City Hall.
He said the city does not have funding to pay for all of the things that would benefit the community, but the city is doing its best to invest in the right things.
Shaw said he looks forward to his fellow commissioners putting forward proposals in coming days about what investments they think are needed.
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