Mayor’s office pushes back against Council’s budget cuts

By Crystal Yormick

Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn’s chief of staff, Nina Nazarian, said the administration is working through the implications of the budget the City Council approved in June that included an 83% cut to the city’s legal budget.

“We’re just digesting that information at this point in time,” said Nazarian.  

She said the cut could potentially affect a union employee, who would not have enough funding for their salary for the year. Councilors responded to this at their meeting, calling it a threat.

“That was not a threat,” Nazarian said. “It was just simply what the implications of their cut were.” 

She pointed out that each year there are negotiations between the council and mayor’s office to balance each party’s interest, which the council has engaged with in the past. 

The city is also evaluating what it will do with the $112,000 in funding that would have gone to the legislative, executive, law, recreation and library departments on the condition that the budget passed without amendments. Because the amount for the legal department changed, this funding will not go through. Nazarian said that money came from a number of sources, including a general tax levy, property takes, building permit fees, and state money. 

The City Council and the mayor’s office have been going back and forth about the budget since the council made a public records request regarding the city’s legal costs for the past five and a half years. Nazarian said the city would have to go through over 31,000 records, which equates to about 395 hours, to address the request just in part, but she did not have an estimate for the entire request.

Nazarian said she has asked the council at least twice to provide one or more members to serve as point person for the request to address it in a “systematic and orderly fashion” over time. The council’s request comes on top of other time sensitive records requests the city has to deal with on top of day-to-day operations, which makes it difficult to complete quickly, she said. 

“It’s just so large that we need direction if they want to prioritize certain things,” Nazarian said. “We need direction on that.” 

The council has not responded to the administration’s request for a point person, she said. However, the council did pass a motion to appeal to the secretary of state the administration’s response to the request. 

“We are in a position where we really need some guidance,” Nazarian said. "It’s been an incredibly busy budget season, and the city has limited resources.”