Curing $787K Budget Shortfall Won't Be Easy, Officials See

Since state aid numbers came out, the city of Brookfield has been looking at a rather large pill to swallow. A , to be more exact, based on Gov. Scott Walker's proposed biennial budget.

Robert Scott, director of finance, hoped to lay out the available options to the Finance Committee Tuesday night. It became clear that while they would rather get the discussion going sooner than later, the real decisions would need to come from the department heads.

"It's hard to go back to the taxpayers and charge them for services that they feel are free, or part of their property tax bill," Alderman Scott Berg said. "In the city, there are 300 employees, and for those department heads that oversee them, I guess I would rather have the staff take a look at the nuts and bolts of what they can do."

Scott sent a memo to the committee, which outlined some areas where money could be generated or moved to help fill the nearly $800,000 gap, but most of them were already at their maximum limits. Ideas included:

• property taxes
• room taxes
• water utility taxes
• video franchise fees

Other sources like building permits and ambulance fees have just been adjusted and were not due for further review until 2014. Fees for garbage collection and recycling are currently a part of the tax levy, but Scott said they could be a possible source of revenue if they were separated as fees. Parks and recreation program fees are a possible target, but wouldn't provide substantial income.

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Certain budgets could be squeezed, including the wastewater utility, which partially funds the MMSD costs to the city; vehicle, equipment and computer replacement funding, which take up $990,000 of the total tax levy the city receives, and benefit funding for former city employees.

Speaking of employees, the payroll for city workers and the services they perform, were also on the table.

"Recognizing that the most significant factor in providing city services is the cost of personnel, substantial changes or reductions in operating budgets would have to include personnel reductions, thus impacting service levels," Scott's memo explained. He pointed to a 2012 survey of residents, which gave high marks to the value placed on city services, and many on the committee felt it would be a hard sell to reduce or eliminate those.

Whether the city ultimately opts to spread the pain out over several areas, or chooses a handful of sources to find the lost revenue, committee members realized that the decisions would not come easily and would likely encounter resistance.

"The thing is, everything in (this memo) has a constituency that likes it just the way it is," Berg said.