Anoka board brushes off last-minute budget cuts

The Anoka County Board voted to trim $400,000 from its proposed 2010 budget, but that wasn't enough to satisfy two commissioners who argued in vain to triple that reduction.

The combined Anoka County levy and the Anoka County Regional Railroad levy will result in a property tax increase of $7.72 for the average home next year, said Cevin Petersen, county finance division manager. That met the county's goal of keeping an increase under $10 per household.

But commissioners Robyn West and Rhonda Sivarajah wanted an 11th-hour rewrite of the proposed $257.8 million budget for 2010.

That budget calls for an average property tax increase of less than $1 per month. The proposed 2010 property-tax levy of $122.17 million marks a $406,000 reduction from the proposed maximum levy OK'd in September.

But on Friday morning, just hours after Thursday night's public truth-in-taxation meeting, Sivarajah and West proposed reducing the levy by $1.3 million. More than half of the proposed savings -- $765,000 -- would have come from a portion of budgeted wage increases, West told fellow board members.

"Is this the right time to set aside $250,000 for market-rate salary adjustments?" Sivarajah and West asked in a letter to other commissioners. "Is this the right time to give performance-based raises? Is this the right time to set aside $5,000 for bonuses?

"We want to make sure we're giving our budget the same scrutiny as families give their budgets," West explained.

But after more than nine months of budget planning, the last-second amendment proposal was met with a collective shrug by the board and was rejected 5-2. The original budget proposal was then approved by the same margin, with Sivarajah and West dissenting.

The process of planning the 2010 budget began more than a year ago, when County Board Chairman Dennis Berg asked departments to consider possible cuts. More than $4 million in cuts were adopted by the board -- helping to offset $3.6 million in reduced state aid due to unallotment. Positions were left vacant, reducing the number of county employees for 2010 to nearly the same number employed in 2001, when the county's population was 10 percent smaller.

"I have a budget we've been fashioning for nine months," Commissioner Jim Kordiak said after hearing West's and Sivarajah's proposal. "None of us are totally happy with this budget."

But Kordiak said that the West/Sivarajah amendment seemed late in the game. The board has never kept its proposed budget a secret, he said, noting that none of the 20 people who attended Thursday's public meeting objected heatedly to the board's proposals.

Paul Levy • 612-673-4419