Daily Archives: October 2, 2008

Budget proposal cuts into the meat of municipal matters

Mayor Darlene Kordonowy wants to trim more than the fat.

Her combined $135.5 million budget proposal for 2009 and 2010 would cut into the meat of emergency services, city staff and several core city functions to offset a continuing trend of falling revenues, largely because of the island’s slowing housing market.

“We’ll have to do more with less,” Kordonowy said during her presentation of the biennial budget to the City Council on Wednesday night.

City staffing levels, under her proposal, would take a 10 percent hit, knocking the city’s 152 full-time positions down to 140 in 2009 and 138 in 2010.

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Mayor vs. manager vote delayed…again

Islanders will vote later rather than sooner on whether to replace the city’s mayor with a hired manager.

At the direction of the city attorney, petitioners seeking a vote to change the city’s form of government will wait until late next year to put their initiative on the ballot, said petition organizer Dennis Vogt.

Petitioners had initially targeted next month’s ballot for the initiative, but lower-than-expected support convinced them that a later date, possibly on the February ballot, would give them more time to gather signatures. Now the vote appears to have been pushed back an additional nine months, to November 2009.

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