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Panel: City must balance ’10 budget
The head of the commission overseeing city finances has doubts about a hefty fee increase for landlords.
CAMPBELL — The city has to overcome a projected $465,000 shortfall in its 2010 budget, and it has to plan for financial recovery in the longer run.
A state commission that is seeing the city through its fiscal- emergency status, which it entered in 2004, has approved only two months of appropriations in the budget. The commission wants revised appropriations Feb. 25, said city finance director Sherman Miles.
There will be no new city employees hired until there are new revenues, said Miles. That decree could affect Mayor George Krinos’ attempt to hire a grants writer.
The state Financial Planning and Supervision Commission for the City of Campbell, which is part of the office of budget and management, met Dec. 17 with city officials. Paul Marshall, commission chairman, said the city must balance the 2010 budget.
City officials also are to give the commission a new long-term plan for recovery in March, said Marshall, explaining that a current plan is no longer going to work because the city’s financial condition has deteriorated.
“The city has a huge problem this year and then going forward,” he continued.
At stake eventually could be Campbell’s incorporation. “Cities can go away — dissolve,” Marshall said. Campbell could become an unincorporated area, part of Coitsville Township or part of another city.
Major employers have left the city, and the aging population with many retirees is also a problem, Marshall said: “Only people working pay income taxes.”
Even though there has been some new business in the city’s brownfield areas along the river, the income tax is declining overall, he said.
Krinos, who was elected in November over longtime mayor Jack Dill, has said his idea to generate $975,000 by imposing a $1,000 per-unit-per-year fee on rental property would beef up the general fund. He wants the fees to fund a home-ownership program, giving loans for down payments that would be forgiven after 10 years if the homeowner remains in Campbell.
Only 20 percent of the revenue generated by the fees would be needed for that program, he said. The other 80 percent, he told The Vindicator, could go into the general fund.
Marshall said he has doubts about the proposal.
“My recommendation to the commission would be not to approve it,” he said, adding that he doesn’t believe the proposal will even pass the city council first before it would come before the commission.
He said the 20-fold increase, from the current $50-per-unit annual fee landlords pay, would be hard to pull off.
“Either landlords eat it or pass it on,” he pointed out. Then, he said, renters would move out to Youngstown or Struthers, where there is plenty of affordable rental property.
If they were to become homeowners instead by taking advantage of the city’s loan program, there wouldn’t be tenants to support the rental fees, he pointed out.
Krinos said Tuesday that he was told by Marshall’s office that “as long as I can put it in black and white numbers, and it makes sense, they’ll consider it.”
He said he is concentrating on getting the proposal to pass council first.
He also said he chose the $1,000 per-unit-per-year figure, which has prompted an outcry from landlords in Campbell, as “a number to start out and trying to figure out where it will end up.”
“It’s not etched in stone,” he said.