Ironton#8217;s leaders must live up to talk
Published 12:00 am Thursday, December 15, 2005
For years, Ironton’s financial experts have sounded sort of like Chicken Little when they said, “The (financial) sky is falling. The (financial) sky is falling.”
Many skeptics have claimed that the cries were overblown exaggerations, just like the animals in the Chicken Little tale.
Well, now the clouds are right overhead and blue skies seem to be getting ever closer. No longer can people claim that these doomsday predictions are off base. The fact is the city is nearly out of money and it is only a matter of when — not if — the city will run out of money if current practices do not change.
City Finance Director Cindy Anderson has told the new council and the mayor that the city will be broke only two months into 2006. The former city council and the mayor have known this was coming but neither stepped up to make changes, each passing the blame to the other.
The time for blame has passed. The time for talk has passed.
Council must act now and live up to the rhetoric that each said during the election: Tough decisions are going to be needed.
Anderson reported that the city only has $88,000 in the bank. While that may sound great for a family of four, it is certainly unacceptable for a city of 11,000 people. If the status quo were to continue — which means the state will come take over as it did in the early 1980s — the city will be nearly $400,000 in the hole at the start of 2007.
So the gauntlet has been thrown and the facts are on the table. Now the council, which includes three new members who have little government experience, will just two months to find some short-term and long-term answers.
The work began Tuesday when the city’s finance committee met to crunch numbers and analyze the budget picture. Though what they saw was likely eye opening and bleak, now is the time to be looking.
And so far, it looks like the group may be on the right track because they are kicking around ideas that include a monthly fee that would go hand in hand with cuts — which when dealing with a spending deficit of nearly $500,000 a year is almost certain to include personnel.
The voters stood up in November and made their voices clear: They don’t want a $10 per month municipal fee. We do not agree with this decision but we feel that to just slap a Band-Aid fee on residents would be a punch in the face to all those who voted against the fee. In addition, doing so fails to address the problem of the city living beyond its means.
For the city to truly move ahead, council must decide where to cut allocations and the mayor must decide what specifically should be cut. Mayor John Elam has the chance to show true leadership and work closely with council to determine what positions he can most live without.
It won’t be easy and it certainly won’t be fun. But true leadership through hard times never is.