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State official: Some Niles workers will lose their jobs
By Jordan Cohen
NILES
The state-appointed financial supervisor said what city leaders and deficit commission members have been reluctant to admit: Some city employees will lose their jobs in 2016.
“The [2016] budget will be based on a 16 percent reduction in appropriations, and for some departments, that looks like it will be people,” said Tim Lintner of the state auditor’s office.
Lintner made the comments Wednesday to the deficit commission overseeing Niles spending. The city has been in fiscal emergency since October 2014.
“I just don’t see how some departments can make it without cutting people, especially police and fire,” Lintner said. “They’re going to take the hit as well. It’s going to be up to the department heads.”
Lintner said he projects general-fund spending next year at nearly $11.5 million. A 16 percent reduction across the board amounts to more than $1.8 million the city will have to cut to balance the budget, which it is required to do under fiscal emergency.
The city’s financial problems were exacerbated earlier this month when voters rejected a 0.25 percent income tax increase. Had it been approved, the increase would have generated $600,000 in 2016 and $900,000 each year afterward.
The defeat means the five-year plan put together for the city to emerge from fiscal emergency will have to be amended. Quentin Potter, commission chairman, said the revised plan will have to be presented in December.
“Delays will increase the amount of reductions each month,” Potter said. “Waiting is costly.”
Several commission members questioned how the amended plan could be developed so soon because the administration is in transition.
Mayor Ralph Infante, who lost in the primary election, leaves office at the end of December to be replaced by Mayor-elect Thomas Scarnecchia.
In addition, the plan has to be approved by city council before it can be resubmitted to the commission.
Infante had a response, however.
“I will have the plan to council before the council meeting Dec. 15 with the mayor-elect,” said Infante who is also a commission member.
The next commission meeting has been scheduled for Dec. 21 to give the administration time to amend the plan.
The meeting produced an obvious disagreement between commission members John Davis and Mary Ann Coates over the issue of income-tax collections at the estimated $31 million Cafaro Complex at the Eastwood Mall.
Lintner said only $20,000 has been collected in income taxes from the project and indicated the amount should be significantly higher. He cited a much larger complex in Westlake that had statistically much greater success by using an income-tax collection agency, something Davis opposes.
Coates, however, said the collection by the city’s income-tax department has been insufficient.
“All you have to do is multiply the payroll by 1.5 percent [the city’s income tax],” said Coates, a certified public accountant. “That’s what we should be collecting, and we are not.”
Lintner said he will update the tax figures at the next commission meeting.
In the original five-year plan, the tax-collection agency would have replaced the city’s four-member income-tax office.