Non-budgeted expenses disturb City Council member

Final figures on Shelbyville budget performance for last year were given to members of the city council on Tuesday, but not before an outburst from one council member saying it's time for the city to stop spending money.

"It's time to stop spending money that's not in the budget, period," council member Al Stephenson said, rasing his voice. "We can't afford to do it!"

The statements came after city manager Ed Craig gave the council a rundown of the final figures from last year's budget.

"We keep this up, we're not going to have any funds to take any money out of," he said. "Where are we going to get the money for more funds?"

Continuing to raise his voice, Stephenson said "we can't keep spending money the way we have ...it's got to stop somewhere."

Seconds later, Stephenson apologized for rasing his voice, but added that the situation with the city's finances makes him angry.

Craig told the council that the bad news was that last year, the city "went in the hole" at a total of $581,358. To cover that, the city will cover the shortage with money from the city's capital fund and some cash from the storm water fund.

But the good news is that revenues were only $61,421 under the nearly $12 million budgeted for 2008-09, which Craig called "pretty close," and expenditures were $28,817 "to the good."

Last year, the city had budgeted a deficit of $565,822 and ended up with a deficit of $598,427, leaving Shelbyville $32,604 over budget.

"We did good with budgeting, but bad by the fact that we lost that much cash" from unexpected expenses, Craig said, such as the demolition of two buildings on East Depot Street and the collapse of the city's underground storm water flume under North Main Street.

Craig added that these funds will hopefully be recovered. The city is currently ready to file a lawsuit against the owner of the condemned property on Depot Street to recover $222,280 spent on the demolition.

A public hearing on those costs is scheduled to be held Thursday at 6 p.m. at the city hall annex.

The city is also looking at action to recover funds spent on repairing the flume after an engineer's report stated that work done by a contractor for Shelbyville Power was responsible for the flume's failure, but Craig said the money for that repair came from a different fund and did not impact the budget.

Shelbyville is currently out some $330,000 for the flume repair, Craig said.

Craig also said the city is closely monitoring expenses to keep them at the lowest level possible.