Clairborne: Combining city resources will help reduce wasteful spending

“Our two biggest things, our pension and our health care, we don’t have control over. Our pension is state; health care is health care. The things we can work out are our own debt — our own debt right now is something like 15 percent of our budget — and I hate that personally, so I would really want to work at reducing that dramatically.”

“A significant part of our budget goes to paying down our debt service, so one of the things that I would do is limit even more of our capital budget list, which is what we buy things with — it’s basically our credit card. I believe this year we’re looking at $3 or $4 million in debt. It’s a good buy, so-to-speak, because the rates are low, but debt is still debt.”

“The other thing is I would invite our taxing entities, both the county and the Ithaca City School District and even the town in some cases, that this would apply and say, “Hey, look at our budgets, let’s look at the things we share. What are the services that we share such as snowplowing? That’s the easy one, how can we help each other here?” The town surrounds Ithaca, so they have to go through Ithaca to get everywhere, so is there somewhere between what they’re doing and what we’re doing that we can help each other with plowing? We can do a big bulk bag of salts for the road, things like that.”

Kelly: The city should examine government contracts to make essential cuts

“The first thing would be to take another look at all of the government worker contracts that are open now. I think there were three contracts that expired at the end of 2010 that are in negotiation now and are three or four that expire at the end of this year. We have to take a much closer look at those because the city is going to absolutely have to either sacrifice the simple core services, which is what the current budget proposes, or we’re going to have to cut the payroll so we don’t get hit with these huge, huge costs for pension benefits. The pension costs have gone to 3,000 percent in the last 10 years. Three thousand, not 300 — 3,000 and the current budget. The mayor brags about not having any layoffs, but they’re not filling 14 jobs, and five of those jobs are either police or firefighters. They’ve warned us up front to expect even worse street repair. That’s not meeting, to my way of thinking, the core responsibilities that city government has to its people.”

Myrick: The city should work with labor unions and modernize its services to reduce spending

“We’ve got an operating deficit right now, which is the $3 million deficit that we’re in debt because we borrowed for large capital projects like parking garages and rebuilding the roads. That debt is something that’s carried by every government. It in itself is not necessarily a bad thing; in most cases, it’s the best way to fund large projects — to carry some sort of debt. You just have to make sure that debt doesn’t rise into a dangerous zone, and we ought to do that with the help of our credit rating companies, places like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Right now, they’ve given the City of Ithaca itself a pretty solid credit rating, and it’s helped that our debt is so manageable and sustainable.”

“For our operating deficit, right now, it’s a $3 million deficit. We’ve got to do a few things. We’ve got to look toward economic development and growth to spur our tax base. We need to add more taxpayers to the city so the burden on each individual is reduced, and we need to find a way to reign in our cost. We can do that by reigning in personnel costs by, if possible, reducing the number of people in the workforce, but what’s preferable is to engage our collective bargaining units, our public employee unions and find a way to contain the fast rising health care and pension costs. We can look to modernize our services and reduce inefficiencies by using technology to increase the effectiveness of each city employee. If we do each of those things, we can reduce our operating deficit and even pay down our capital deficit.”

“We can no longer tax or cut our way out of our problems, we have to look for efficiencies in government, and we have to grow our way out. When I say efficiencies I mean operational efficiencies, not cutting further personnel and programs. We’ve done all that we can. We’ve got street paving crew members riding on garbage trucks now, so that’s an indicator you’ve really scraped the bottom of the barrel. We’ve got a lot of people who have left who we haven’t replaced, so we have people doing two jobs. We have to grow our way out by creating skill-grade jobs and looking for operational efficiencies.”