Wading Through The Budget
By Greg L | 3 March 2008 | Prince William County | 17 Comments
Trying to go through the proposed budget for Prince William County is always an exercise in frustration, as the financial data is never presented in a way that seems to make sense. In-car cameras and cell phones for the Prince William County Police Department have a unit cost of over $12,000? The Director of the Office of Information Technology and his deputy are perhaps the highest paid county government employees, with combined annual salaries of nearly $470,000? That the county spends over $1.2 million annually on development and operation of the county website, not even counting costs for financial systems, geographic information systems, and Human Resources? This is crazy.
Either this information is not being presented in a way that accurately reflects the true budget request, or there’s a whole lot of rather questionable spending going on here. Unfortunately, I fear the county staff has done their best to accurately describe the spending they want for next year, although they certainly could do a lot better to fully explain what that spending actually is. I do notice no line item for the Prince William County Police Department Amazon Mounted Cavalry Company, which requires twice as much training per officer as the Section 287(g) Program. While the officer training for the 287(g) Program is broken out, equestrian unit training is not.
By the way, when the Finance Department wants to spend $8 million on “personal services” for example, I am assuming this means “personnel costs” and someone just got a little lazy with the spell checker. No, I don’t think that massages for county employees by the former Mayor of Dumfries is budgeted in Fiscal Year 2009. Right?
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The horse mounted officers may not have any impact on law enforcement. But at least the women chosen for that unit are fun to look at.
It’s not very cost effective, but a nice piece of public relations
The Prince William County Police Department Amazon Mounted Cavalry Company sounds like a luxury that we could live without. Anything else we ought to bring to the attention of our District Supervisor’s?
If Personal Services means the same at the County level as it does in the Federal Government, it refers to the practice of hiring consultants and contractors often non-competitively and without a specified statement of work (or some agreement regarding what they will do or deliver). It’s a way to bring in “bodies” (often cronies, family, friends, etc.) The Federal Government outlawed the practice because of the opportunities for abuse. (IMHO) ALL contractors should be competitively selected for specified work. I’m guessing my assessment is correct (since they didn’t break down tasks or deliverables in the budget for these “personal services”.)
Good report, by the way.
I know I wish I could get 1.2 million for web hosting and updates. My customers pay MUCH less than that and probably get better service!!
I am interested in the salary of the IT dept being close to 500k. WHAT?!?! Is this just 2 people or the entire staff?
I agree they should break down personal services and if they are like what Old Soldier says, they need to go ASAP. I think all contracts should be completive bid. This gets the best possible price. Enough with the good ole boy system. It is time to trim some pork fat from the budget. Let’s trim it back and if the county office that has the cut back can’t do the same work for that amount of money, lets find people to either work in that office or change leaders. Let’s cut the fat off of the budget and lets do it now.
I know when I have tight times, I have to make some decisions on what to cut out. Guess what goes first, entertainment then eating out. It is time for the county offices to remove some of their “entertainment” budget.
Interesting, I clicked on the link and it says:
Service Unavailable
Now where is my budget money at now? I bet this is so they can say, see if we cut the budget, we loose services like the web site and when it is down, it makes PWC look bad. We need more money to keep it up and running so our image is not tarnished in any way. SHEEEESH!!!!
Re: Anything else we ought to bring to the attention of our District Supervisor’s?
Yes, the police boat. All it’s used for is to ascertain that Tim’s Rivershore keeps a mooring for it during the annual Hilda Barg look-alike bikini contest.
Greg, Medic, and Old Soldier, maybe you should actually *read* the budget document before passing judgement or trying to figure out what certain line items mean when they are defined right in the section confusingly titled “Understanding the Budget.”
From that section, “Personal Services” covers “Salaries for all full-time, part-time and temporary employees, including overtime, Sunday and holiday pay, shift differentials and per diem compensation for members of certain boards and commissions.” In others words, salaries and wages for county employees. I think you’re right that the term really should be “Personnel” not “Personal,” but it is defined in the budget document.
Saying the Director of IT and his deputy have a combined salary of close to $470,000 is flat out wrong. That number, I’m assuming is pulled from the section on Leadership and Management in the IT department budget with the *activity* budgeted at $469,680. That includes the salaries for 2.05 FTEs, but also includes all other expenses related to the Leadership and Management in IT. It would be nice if these were broken out in more detail, but assuming this “nearly $470,000″ is all salaries is a pretty big leap. Same with the $1.2 million for Web Systems Support Services. It would be nice to see more details about how the $1.2 million is spent, but it’s for more than just the county’s public Web site. It also covers the county’s intranet, development of Web-based application used internally or on the public Web site.
As for the IT staff salary, there are 85.54 FTEs in the budget, with a total “Personal Services” line amount of $6,119,200, which works out to an average salary of around $71,500 per FTE, which would be a the lower end of the range for computer professionals in the area, not something absurd.
Having lived here nearly twenty years, my conclusion is that the primary purpose of the published budget is to highlight popular, necessary programs, and camouflage offensive and useless spending which would be an easy target for fiscal conservatives, so that the tax-and-spend advocates can cry “Where would you cut the budget?” Since the only specifics in the budget are for popular, necessary programs, and the worthless ones are hidden, it is a built-in defense mechanism against meaningful fiscal responsibility.
Martin Briley is the highest paid county employee because he makes commission when he convinces a business to come to Prince William. Too bad he doesn’t give the county back the money when that same company decides not to come after all (Eli Lily).
Perhaps we should just cut him out and save some money there.
Hmmm…. said on 3 Mar 2008 at 9:34 pm:
As I stated in a previous post I was questioning whether it was the entire staff or just the 2 people.
/\/\3|)iç 64 (Winner of the BVBL 40k and 50k post award) said on 3 Mar 2008 at 6:07 pm:
“I am interested in the salary of the IT dept being close to 500k. WHAT?!?! Is this just 2 people or the entire staff?”
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I understand the expense of web application development. I consider myself pretty web savvy. I tried to look at the budget line items to see what was there for myself, but the Service was Unavailable.
I know how it works with budgets. While I was in the Navy I had to order a bunch of plaster and braces for the Orthopedic clinic in Sept to spend all of the money at the end of the fiscal year. If I didn’t we had a surplus and would loose that money next year. I am pretty confident that is what’s happening here. We need to start looking into the expenses and question where the money goes and why. Justification for spending the money is needed. I say we cut everyone’s budget by 10%. Let them work with that for the year and see how it goes.
According to page 381 of the fiscal plan, there is a comment about the mounted unit. Looks like the annual amount to pay for the program is $6,000. I did notice that it says both revenue and expenditure so I wonder where the revenue comes from? I may ask one of the horsie women next time I see them about Manassas…….
C’mon, Dolph! Let the horsie women alone.
Oh Advocator, you misread me. I fully support the horsie women. I think they are worth every penny. I do think much private donations are involved. Fess up, Advocator, are you a donor?
Back when I was taking equestrian lessons (hunter/jumper), my favorite position was the “Two Point”, behind one of the ladies!
It has been many years since I have done any horse-back riding, Ducky. I have included this link to help people visualize your comment.
http://www.equisearch.com/horses_riding_training/english/hunter_jumper/beyondtwopoint_081406/
What Hmmm…. said on 3 Mar 2008 at 9:34 pm - Greg, Medic, and Old Soldier, maybe you should actually *read* the budget document … From that section, “Personal Services” covers “Salaries for all full-time, part-time and temporary employees, including overtime, Sunday and holiday pay, shift differentials and per diem compensation for members of certain boards and commissions.”
Actually, I did read the budget. the line item you describe is the sort of summarization one expects from the “personal services” that I refer to… a generic bullet that covers millions of dollars for unspecified employees doing undefined work. I am guessing that they are (or include) contractors. “Temporary employees” is often code for independant contractors. Boards and commissions are appointed without oversight or competition by District supervisors.
Any well managed business should be able to break out 8 million dollars better than this. Since this business is in the business of spending our money, we should demand more accountability.
You read the budget as those who wrote it intended.
Patrolling with the Mounted Police
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmoV72INoqw
Very good video.
A new spin on “going where no MAN has gone before” lol to the comments about AMAZON mounted police~ Perhaps some jealous wanna be cowboys? ( just kidding of course) I think it is a positive!
1. So, 6k in the budget for this horse patrol and already found a man that was wanted for 99k in child support on a complaint call that men were drinking behind a house, tossing trash and disturbing the peace.
2.The horses are owned by The Park Authority and are getting exercised for all of you animal lovers out there
Better and MORE approachable community interaction
Happy Trails~
WHAT WOULD ROY ROGERS have to say about this debate?
* Horses owned by National Park Service