Grosse Pointe Woods Allocates $50,000 for Residential Streets

Pete Waldmeir, GP Woods June 19, 2012 at 02:22 pm

Who says you can't beat City Hall? If it wasn't for our growing citizens' group - GrossePointeWoodsTruth.com - keeping up the pressure for fiscal reform instead of raising taxes, the Woods city council never would have taken even that token $50 grand from the budget's so-called "fund balance" and dedicated it to residential road repairs. Actually, all council was doing was throwing Woods' taxpayers a bone before asking them to vote for a $10-million-for-10 years roads bond issue in November. That's in addition, of course, to another $10 million "Headlee Override" tax proposal that, if passed, they can spend on anything they choose. More importantly last night (June 18), also because of citizen pressure, council rescinded it's previous decision to give three administrators - the City Clerk, City Manager and Treasurer-Comptroller each an extra week of paid vacation every year and declined to finalize their own earlier recommendation to add expensive optical care to the privately-contracted city attorney's already questionable fully-paid health care benefit. City Clerk Lisa Hathaway was absent from the Monday night meeting. She was attending a city-financed (including her salary and expenses) three day conference of clerks in a posh northern Michigan resort. One of the advertised sessions at the conference: "Clerking 101."

Chris K June 19, 2012 at 04:09 pm

Pete: Thanks for the information. I think the commitment of the $50,000 to the local street fund was in response to new government accounting standards applied to municipal governments intended to ensure more fiscal transparency by showing what money they have available for spending or what money is restricted. I have to think that if they hadn't been under the gun to apply the new accounting standard this money would not have been committed to fix the roads. Probably would be more money floating in the budget while the raise the tax bunch in GPW claims we are floating in red ink.
I wonder how this $50,000 - must allocate now in GPW - nugget stacks up with other local governments and thank goodness it wasn't allocated for a bigger volunteer party!

Pete Waldmeir, GP Woods June 19, 2012 at 07:00 pm

Chris: Up to now in Grosse Pointe Woods, the term "fiscal transparency" has been an oxymoron. Kinda like "military intelligence." On Monday night's Woods council agenda, the city's May 2012 "financial report" was listed to be checked and approved. But, as usual, the actual financial report was not included in the council's packet for review. Instead it was sent directly to the council's finance committee, there to be kept secret and buried.