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STEUBENVILLE -- City Council knocked off three more departmental budget hearings, this time focusing on Municipal Court, the sanitation department and maintenance and repair.
The sanitation department’s fiscal outlook has been steadily declining during the past decade, and Supervisor Bob Baird told council Tuesday he doesn’t see it getting better without help.
“With any business, any department in this city, any organization, your revenues have to at least match your expenses or you’re going down,” Baird said. “So there’s only there’s only two ways that I know of to address that kind of broadly -- one is revenue and the other is expenses: You have to increase revenue to decrease expenses to get to break even. So I’m not saying I know where the answer lies. I’m just saying that those are the two tools or the two things to work on.
He said rates “would have to go up $9.20 for his department to break even.”
“I might catch heat on this, that’s fine,” Mayor Ralph Petrella said. “But we’ve got to stop kicking stuff down the road ... we have to stop kicking stuff down the road as a city. We need to start looking at what we have to do to maintain that level of service and not operate in a deficit. So I might I might take some heat from that personally, which is fine. But I don’t want to put that on my children in the future, you know.”
“I don’t know why you would take heat,” Third Ward Councilwoman Heather Hoover interjected. “Listen, I’m not opposed to it, I’ll say it. I mean, I’d rather pay $9.20 more a month on my bill to make sure my trash is being picked up and I do still have the options of our bulk pickups. However, we don’t have to do them the same way.”
Baird, meanwhile, pointed out that after the hefty increase in per ton costs they’ve encountered for road salt this year if it’s at all possible, it would make sense to look at adding salt storage capacity.
The city initially had planned to purchase road salt through the state contract, only to find out no salt suppliers on the state list for the first round were interested in filling the city’s needs. It was readvertised, but the supplier wanted to more than double the price. Steubenville ended up teaming with the Jefferson County engineer, Wintersville and some townships and located a seller willing to work with them, and while they’re still paying more than last year, the price tag will be significantly less than what they would have paid through the state contracting system.
Baird said having more storage capacity would give them options down the road.
“If you can buy it cheap, even better,” he said. “It’s not going to go bad, it’s already been in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. It’s not going to go stale or anything. It’d be good to have.”
Municipal Judge John Mascio said his department is working hard to stretch city dollars as far as they can.
“We continue to see grant opportunities,” he said. “We’ve done very well with grants this past year. Our mental health court is entirely funded through the Ohio Department of Mental Health Addiction Services -- we get $75,000 from them. We have some other sources that fund that as well.
The court also is replacing its case management system thanks to a $220,000 technology grant.
“Those things are big-ticket items. (We’re getting) about $250,000 through a special project fund and the court will make up the difference, so we’re going to get (it) for about $30,000,” he said. “And then I think it’s important to note our probation department is fully funded through a grant that we get through the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections -- we’re fully operating our mental health court and our probation department at no cost to the city. Employees do make, in terms of wages a little bit in excess of what the grant covers, and we pay the difference through the court’s special project fund.”
Recently implemented increases in court costs will add to the court’s special projects fund (about $7,000 more per year) as well as the court’s technology fund (generating about $25,000 more per year).
Mascio said they’re also cutting where they can without impacting services -- for instance, he’s projecting a $7,000 savings just from opting to satisfy requirements that they a copy of the Ohio Revised Code be available at all times by switching to a digitized version instead of the book version previously employed.
And while salaries in his office total $489,000, “It’s important to recognize that about$170,000 of that is grant funding,” he said. “So the cost to the city for our employees is about $330,000.”
Mascio said some line items, like postage increases and public defender costs, are out of his control.