Budgeting Woes.

A budget is a hard thing to plan.

As evidenced by the Oct. 20 City Council meeting, not everybody can have a say in where the money goes and certainly not everybody is going to be happy. An issue that popped up at the Oct. 6 meeting was that three organizations in Greeley weren't going to be funded in the 2010 city budget and it would be extremely hard for those organizations to find the money in order to provide their services to the community.

To work around that issue the City Council is putting the city's Senior Planner position on a temporary hiring hold. This hold is going to provide the city with an extra $7,500 a month. That money is going to help the Weld County Food Bank, Envision and The Transition House, all of which provide services to the community. However, not everybody got what they wanted A Woman's Place ended up losing money to help out the other services.

Another Issue brought up by Greeley resident, George Metcalf, is that the City Council should have a bigger part in the budget process. As it stands the 2010 budget was created in 2008 during a Budget Retreat. Circumstances change and now a lot of what was planned has been revised. Roy Otto, Greeley's City Manager, oversees a great deal of this change along with Greeley's Finance Director, Tim Nash.

This process didn't sit well with mayor Ed Clark and Council members Maria Secrest and Mike Finn, who voted against approving the 2010 budget because they'd like to be able to work more closely with the budget. The budget was approved by four votes but there may be a change in that process over the horizon.

Not all problems can be solved at once, and often times dealing with money will cause more headaches than it solves.