County Bulging Against 2012 Budget Constraints

When the previous Montgomery County Board of Commissioners in December, it included an across-the-board 2.5 percent cut for most county departments. It did not, however, include specific instructions for how those cuts should be achieved.

As March begins, that process is ongoing. Uri Monson, the county's chief financial officer, told the current board of commissioners on Thursday that the county's various courts, departments, and offices had so far managed to make $7.72 million in "adjustments" to comply with the budget, but that more changes would be needed to close the remaining gap of $2.24 million.

The county distributed copies of Jan. 5 memos sent by Monson to virtually all county offices in which Monson asked each of them to submit at least one proposal for complying with the budget.

See county CFO Uri Monson's full budget update and the Jan. 5 memos in the PDF section accompanying this article.

"Whenever possible, reduction scenarios should strive to achieve the new spending levels with minimal or no reductions in the workforce," Monson wrote in the memo.

As evidenced by , some parts of county government were unable to avoid paring their headcounts. Information technology was named by Monson as the department with the third largest budget gap, behind the district attorney's office and the county's corrections department. Those three departments, together with the county courts and the child welfare department, made up $5.3 million of the original budget deficit.

Not "an honest attempt to budget"

Monson was strongly critical of the previous administration's budgeting approach.

"The county opened a new prison last year, but the budget as it was approved assumed that there would be no staff at that prison ... it's disingenuous to say that you'll open a new prison and have no staff for it," Monson said.

Monson said that the addition of a new seat to the county's court of common pleas was handled similarly. According to Monson, the budget included a salary for a new judge but no allocations for any additional staff, or other expenses associated with operating an additional courtroom.

"It's not what I would consider to be an honest attempt to budget," Monson said.

In about a month, the new board of commissioners will be legally permitted to shift money around within the budget, which Monson said may allow the county to shift funds from departments with surpluses to those with deficits. As the year progresses, Monson said, additional opportunities for revenue or increased efficiency may present themselves, allowing the county to further close the $2.24 million gap.

Castor: Previous budgets were "lies"

Monson singled out one budget example for particular criticism: the county's costs for the use of outside legal counsel.

According to Monson, the county budgeted $100,000 per year for that purpose but in fact spent upwards of $500,000 per year for "the last several years."

"You can have ‘one year anomalies’ and that's fine, but three or four years, I consider that a trend," Monson said. "Despite that, the budget continued to reflect only $100,000 in outside counsel."

"For what purpose would the budgeting authorities do such a thing?" asked Commissioner Bruce Castor.

"One is to not show what the true costs are of running government," Monson replied. "Another is to hide how much you're spending on a particular category."

"That means that somebody, knowing that we historically pay a half a million dollars or more in outside counsel was only budgeting $100,000," Castor said during a press conference following the meeting.

"That comes to the commissioners for a review, and that's not a true number. I wonder how much of that goes through the entire budget ... all along during the four years of the previous administration I knew that we were hemorrhaging money and I always wanted to know where it was. The other commissioners [James Matthews and Joseph Hoeffel] were always saying, 'Look, our budget is the same.' Well, I think those budgets were lies," Castor said.

"The other budgets that were presented to the public and to me were not true reflections of the county's budgetary position and were done to fool me and the public into thinking that the county was being managed in a responsible way when it was not," said Castor.

Monson said he did not currently believe the unbudgeted outside counsel expenditures were representative of a systemic problem within the 2012 budget.

"These are a couple of examples. They are larger ticket items. They had a more dramatic impact on the effort that we were making to make the cuts. That one in particular was very frustrating. It stood out because it was an anomaly," Monson said during the press conference.

Investigation of outside counsel expenditures is a possibility

Castor left the door open to a future investigation of the outside counsel expenditures, pending additional information from Monson and other county officials.

"I guarantee you, I did not vote on $2 million worth of lawyers' bills. Because I would notice that ... I will not hesitate to do whatever I think is appropriate to follow up on any suspicions I have. I'm not going to tell you now what they are. There are officers in the county government whose job it is to ascertain whether money is spent appropriately and we are in the process of utilizing their skills," Castor said.

Commissioner Josh Shapiro said the 2012 budget review was "laying the groundwork" for a more transparent 2013 budgeting process.

"We were dealt a bad hand," Shapiro said. "We're playing the hand we've been dealt, and I think we're playing it in a bipartisan, open, transparent way."