Them’s some fancy words from our chief finance bull thrower (FF 52:00)
So what is a structural deficit?
the amount by which a government’s spending is more than it receives in taxes in a particular period, whether the economy is performing well or not
Mr. Pritchett made this wild claim at the city council meeting last night, and six of the councilors agreed with him.
It is total nonsense.
As one citizen pointed out the way to not produce municipal debt is to budget better, in other words do the job we elected you to do. He also pointed out that this $2 million dollar increase is less than 1% of the total budget and can easily be made up.
The problem is for decades the city has implemented the piling on approach to building the yearly budget instead of doing zero based budgeting each year. This has caused bloated department budgets.
As for property taxes, valuations in Sioux Falls have skyrocketed over the past 3 years driving property taxes up with or without government intervention.
Even if the economy was doing great right now, this natural FREE market increase makes up for any inflationary increases we may need.
We also have given millions away in TIFs.
It cracks me up that the city council would nickel and dime $50K for the Siouxland Heritage endowment fund and $68K for an arts coordinator, but doesn’t blink an eye approving $50 million in TIFs for parking ramps attached to luxury condos.
That’s our council doing the important work, making sure developers, banksters and bondsters are happy and well fed.
I’m starting to think the only structural deficit the city has exists between the ears of our councilors.