Auditor Announces $16M More In City Budget Shortfall
NBC 4
There are more budget problems for the City of Columbus, officials announced Tuesday.
Published: April 7, 2009
Updated: April 8, 2009
COLUMBUS, Ohio—There are more budget problems for the City of Columbus, officials announced Tuesday.
The city auditor told the mayor that the city is short another $16 million this quarter, saying it’s a direct result of the high unemployment rate, NBC 4‘s Tacoma Newsome reported.
Auditor Hugh Dorrian said the city is short the money in addition to the $13 million needed in January.
Dorrian said the reason is simple: the city isn’t collecting as much income tax, which makes up two-thirds of the city’s operating budget.
“I’m sorry to say unemployment continues to rise. Our biggest source of money to operate the city is the city income tax. Not only is there no growth, it is continually going negative compared to prior years,“ Dorrian said.
The answer to the problem, Dorrian said, is to raise the income tax rate by at least half a percent. That would bring in $90 million to $100 million more annually.
In a statement from his office, Mayor Michael Coleman responded, “to address this $16 million gap, the administration and city council must work closely together, similar to what we did leading up to the adoption of the 2009 budget.“
Dorrian also pointed out that more than 50 percent of income tax revenue is collected from non-residents.
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Reader Reactions
Increasing the income tax rate will not solve the problem. The problem is mismanagement. The problem is that the city of Columbus needs to live w/in it’s means… like we have to. When times were good they should have been saving money instead wasting it. They also need to start deducting money out of the city worker’s paycheck for their own pension.
Hey! Let’s just tax the rest of the people that are lucky enough to still have jobs, then we can build another worthless park for bums and sex offenders, and then we can build a rail system that will take us to another city that is falling apart, and then hey why not build a few more condo’s downtown that no one will buy, or maybe tear down another bridge and overspend on rebuilding it to make it look “good”——WORTHLESS SPENDING IS THE PROBLEM NOT UNEMPLOYMENT
Maybe they will hand out 165 million in bonuses and our “Savior” will wait a week or two to denounce that activity.
Does anybody else see a problem here?The unemployment rate isn’t high enough to cause this amount of budget shortfalls.i smell a rat there is no way in that the number of unemployed in this town paid 16 mil in income tax.I would say we have an over spending problem.lets start by getting rid of meditation rooms and foot massagers at the city employees desks,cut some of the holiday pay out and quit letting them retire after 20 years.Scrap the city center project its a waste anything the govt. runs is a failure maybe its because they dont earn the money they spend.
Looks like the time is right for big bonuses to be handed out at city hall! Big budget failures, taxpayer bailout money coming in from the government, I mean from US, yep, it’s bonus time guys!!
Free money! A big bottomless pit of free money….
Wake up Columbus and vote these bums OUT!
they need the $16 Mil for trees we don’t need.
like i said before, sell the govenors mansion, that would save a lot of money that they are getting ready to put into the place, stop the work on 315, don’t need it. look at all the money they would save. if you don’t have it to spend, don’t write checks. if one of us did that they would lock us up for writing bad checks. the cops should be at there door. forgot they sign there paychecks.
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