[R]UTLAND — Mayor David Allaire missed the city deadline for presenting a municipal spending plan to the Board of Aldermen for the next fiscal year.
The deadline set in the municipal charter is Nov. 1. However, there is no penalty for missing that. According to Allaire, he plans to present the budget to the 11-member board Monday at its next meeting.
Allaire, a veteran member of the Board of Aldermen, was elected mayor in March, ousting incumbent Christopher Louras. This is Allaire’s first city budget cycle as mayor.
How big a deal missing the deadline is, if any, depends largely on whom you ask. At least one board member said the delay of a few days isn’t the problem but that it does speak to the mayor’s leadership and ability to complete a task on time.
“Given his experience and given the time he had to pull it together, I would have expected it by Nov. 1,” Alderman Christopher Ettori said Thursday. “I think the point here is that it could be emblematic of the way Dave is as mayor.”
Others said it’s much ado about nothing.
Alderman Gary Donahue, chair of the board’s Charter and Ordinance Committee, said Thursday he didn’t see missing the deadline as a problem, especially since there is no penalty for it in the charter.
“Somebody is making a big, blow-up story about absolutely nothing,” Donahue said. “There is a limit. If it came in on the 15th of the month, or the second meeting of November … then it’s a big issue.”
Allaire could not be reached Thursday for comment. He did post about the matter on his Facebook page around 10:15 p.m. Wednesday.
“I want to update everyone of the progress we are making on the Fiscal year 19 which I will present to the Board of Aldermen Monday night,” Allaire wrote. “We are doing everything we can to minimize increases, but it’s going to go up.”
He wrote that added positions covered with money from the city’s “unassigned fund balance” in this year’s budget will result in $350,000 that needs to be accounted for in the fiscal 2019 plan.
“We are working with an Interim Fire Chief, an Acting Superintendent of Recreation, new human resources director, and this is my first budget” as mayor, he added.
Sharon Davis, board president, said Thursday she didn’t see a problem with receiving the budget a few days late.
Louras, who served 10 years as mayor, said Thursday that he didn’t miss the deadline for presenting budgets to the board during his time in office. When he first became mayor, the charter at the time said he had to present a city budget to the aldermen by the first board meeting in June.
That left him only 82 days from his swearing-in to the budget’s due date. For Allaire, it’s been more than 200 days since he took the oath of office.
For his later years as mayor, Louras said, a charter change that required citizen approval of the city spending plan moved the budget delivery deadline to Nov. 1.
“Deadlines in the charter should not be blown off,” the former mayor said.
Jeffrey Wennberg, who served 12 years as mayor and is now the city’s public works commissioner, said he didn’t believe he ever missed the deadline for presenting the budget, which during his tenure was due at the first board meeting in June.
But he said he would rather see a city budget presented a few days late and be more accurate, than be inaccurate and on time.
“Given the choice, do you want it in strict compliance with the charter, or do you want it right?” he said. “Do you want reliable numbers or do you want ballpark guesses?”
He said it wasn’t worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct a new reappraisal at that time. “It would have been a foolish waste of the taxpayers’ money,” he said.
The board has until Dec. 31 to approve the budget, and it is then voted on by residents on Town Meeting Day in March.
In a bit of a twist, the aldermen did miss that charter-set deadline by several weeks in the previous budget cycle. The board didn’t approve the budget until weeks later due to a battle with Louras over the Fire Department’s spending plan.
Alderman William Notte, who was board president at that time, said Thursday that he advocated going past the deadline in the last budget cycle and, in the end, got a budget that voters approved on Town Meeting Day.
“The charter has a lot of you must do this, you must do that, without any penalties if we don’t,” Notte said. “To be fair, I don’t know what the penalties could be.”
He added that he understands this is Allaire’s first cycle as mayor and he has a new human resources director and city attorney. “I do think it’s important to follow the charter whenever possible, but I think this is a tempest in a teapot,” Notte said.
Rebecca Mattis, elected to her first term on the board in March, said Thursday she wasn’t too concerned about not getting the budget until Monday night.
“I like rules, but I’m also flexible,” she said.
Donahue said even if the budget had been available prior to Monday’s meeting, he probably wouldn’t have delved that deeply into it over the weekend.
“I usually fall asleep reading the thing,” he said.
