Lake Worth to Spend More Than it Brings In

Pam Triolo, mayor of Lake Worth
and a long-time Republican,
voted to approve this budget

Why is the city planning to spend more in the next fiscal year than it will be bringing in? And why are Republican, supposedly pro-business, pro-fiscal sanity city commissioners all for this?

City Commissioner Scott Maxwell jumped the gun at last night's city commission meeting and proposed to vote to approve the almost $29 million city budget as presented and move to schedule a second reading (as required by law) later this month even though the budget proposes to spend almost a half a million more than the city plans to bring in during the next fiscal year, which starts on October 1.

Oh, it's technically a balanced budget, because the big $423,000 hole is filled by taking that amount out of the reserve fund. That leaves a little over $2 million in the reserve fund. Fine, you say. But according to the five-year budget projection provided by city staff, that reserve fund is emptied out a little more than a year from now and by 2015 is showing a negative balance of $3 million.

Only outgoing city commissioner Suzanne Mulvehill seemed at all perturbed by this.

"We're just postponing the diasaster...is what is essentially happening," she told fellow commissioners.

She also questioned why the amount of money proposed to go to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office is going up and up in future years when the city of Lake Worth was promised that the total contract amount will go down, with savings to the city over the next few years.

Police and Fire Pensions Shooting Up

Lake Worth is paying more than $14 million this year to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office for police protection. Three years from now, the city is expecting to be paying $16 million to the PBSO, according to the city's five-year budget projection.

The increase, says city finance manager Steve Carr, has to do "totally" with pensions. The cost of paying out pensions to retired PBSO officers is expected to jump from just over $2 million this year to almost $3.5 million three years from now.

Those pension promises were made by PBSO. But Lake Worth has options, reminded Carr, as the amount Lake Worth pays to the PBSO will be revisited at the end of this year.