Hector and Abdul: city finances are a maze of puzzles, and it's almost impossible to get your arms around all the pieces at any one time. Reynolds sure hasn't. And to scare you a ltitle more: of the 29 city council members, maybe 5 have it correct. From either party.

Oft omitted from these puzzles: municipal corporations, whose budgets are, well, “odd” at best. And total debt is sometimes difficult to process, too, because those muncicorps can issue debt as well.

Who fed you the 80-20 number, Abdul? Did you see any reason to check it out?

This recession isn't getting much ebtter. Methinks the sales/income tax shortfalls will continue, perhaps for 2012-13, too.

Ballard is going to have to start talkign about the kinds of cuts faced by almost every school board and public entity in Indiana. It's not a fun conversation.

Ask Jackie Nytes and joanne Sanders. They saw this coming four years ago, and started going through each item of the city-county budget. Those budget hearings on Ch. 16 were painful to watch. Form the viewer's eye, they got almost no cooperation. In fact, elected officeholders often politely reminded them their budgets were “their own.”

Pascal, some of this is federally-mandated, and, quite frankly, too-long-delayed. Our Combined Sewer Overflow issue, for example, was first apointed out in the late 70s. The cost to (borrow and) fix it then was one-fifth what it is today.
So it's true: problems delayed are problems amplified. But hyet, we had those Hudnut-Lugar-Goldsmith years with almost no new taxes!
Yesssiree! We can't take a dump when it rains, but we had no new taxes.
The fix: now almost a billion dollars.
Another expensive fix delayed: the jail. A conservative Republican federal judge told the county to fix this mess 14 years ago. It's not completely fixed yet–it's a bunch of band-aids.
I'll give Ballard and Peterson this much: both have stepped up to deal with these problems. Waiting more could cost us fines and even-higher costs.