On Tuesday, the Beaumont City Council got its first look at a budget for the 2016-17 fiscal year, which begins July 1. In any other city, this would be unremarkable, given that the process of developing and reviewing proposed budgets is a routine responsibility of government.
But in Beaumont, this is significant. For many years, the city has simply not operated with the sort of oversight, professionalism or standards that should be expected from a government. Certainly, the sort of culture that resulted in criminal charges against seven former city officials also yielded a compromised system of accounting and budgeting.
Following the April 2015 raids on City Hall, the offices of longtime city consultant Urban Logic and then-City Manager Alan Kapanicas, it became apparent that Beaumont has long been budgeting on flimsy sets of assumptions. Late last year, the city belatedly approved a budget for the current year, months after it otherwise would have.
As part of that process, the city learned it had to cut $4 million in spending, no small feat in the context of a budget that has generally hovered around $30 million. Since then, the city has worked diligently to get a clear understanding of exactly how much money it has and where its finances stand.
The preliminary budget indicates the swift and significant cuts the council approved last September have on some level put the city on the right track. The city is actually presently expecting to close out this year and next with greater revenues than expenses. For the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, Beaumont projects a surplus of $1.4 million, and for the next year projects a surplus of $368,000.
However, the city is still in the process of reviewing and auditing its finances in the past few years, and is expecting to deal with an accumulated budget deficit of at least several million dollars, though the precise figure is yet to be determined.
“Nobody knows how much it is,” Richard Warne, interim city manager, told the council. “We think it’s somewhere between $6 million and $10 million, but we don’t know how much it is.”
“It’s going to take some pain and some time to get out of it,” Mr. Warne said.
The city will be holding budget hearings over the coming weeks. We suggest the public participates and keeps a close eye on the process as it unfolds.