Warren City Council expected to OK budget

By Ed Runyan | December 28, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

WARREN

At tonight’s regular meeting, Warren City Council is expected to approve a $27.4 million general-fund budget that anticipates a second-consecutive year of rising revenues.

The 2012 spending plan, which includes adding three road, maintenance and parks workers, calls for spending $1.4 million more than in 2011.

That’s no mean feat considering the financial problems the city faced in 2009 and 2010, when it lost $3 million in revenue because of the poor economy and had to lay off police officers, firefighters and others to balance the budget.

The city anticipated a revenue increase of about $500,000 in 2011 and got about $1 million, allowing it to amend its $26 million 2011 budget several times to about $28 million, according to the city’s Finance Department.

Councilman Al Novak, chairman of the city council finance committee, said income-tax revenues from RG Steel (formerly Severstal) and GM Lordstown, as well as improved collections of inheritance taxes helped boost the city’s revenue.

The city will use the money to make more road repairs, cut more grass and take better care of buildings in 2012, Novak said.

There are no plans at this time to increase the number of police officers, though the department will get an additional dispatcher.

Doug Franklin, who will be sworn in as mayor Saturday, will have an additional employee working in his office to replace Roselyn Ferris, longtime clerk/administrator to the current mayor, Michael O’Brien.

The Law Department also will have an additional prosecutor working out of Warren Municipal Court in 2012, Novak said.

“We will be able to address some needs in the Operations Department, where we were sorely understaffed,” Franklin said Tuesday of the roads, parks and buildings workers.

Novak mentioned at the finance committee meeting that he’s concerned about the prospect of having to lay off some of the 25 firefighters hired this year and last year through a $5 million, 2-year federal Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response program grant and the unemployment costs that will go along with the layoffs.

But Councilman Dan Sferra said he didn’t understand why Novak raised the issue.

“I thought we all knew that the grant was for two years ... and we would probably lose some of them. We said it from the beginning it was for two years.”

The firefighters hired with the grant money knew going in that they might not be able to keep those jobs, Sferra said.