Monday’s public forum with a hundred or so people crowding in before the Henderson City Council was a rousing success in many ways.
It opened a healthy discussion on why the city’s general fund balance, its savings account, shrank by more than $4 million in five years.
It gave City Manager Eric Williams a chance to explain how policy decisions at the local and state levels can affect the city’s bottom line for years to come.
It opened a healthy if belated dialogue about Embassy Square, what it has cost city taxpayers and, more important at this point, what it will cost us as the development continues and facilities open.
Most important, it proved that people at all levels across this city care about where our leaders are taking us and want an active role. No more will we accept deals cut in the dark, and no more will we allow organizations operating in secrecy to control major decisions that affect millions of dollars.
But the forum was only a beginning, one that will be meaningless if the public and city officials don’t follow through.
We still don’t know why the city’s Embassy Square South spending ran over budget by almost $400,000, or why such a basic step as a budget ordinance amendment could have been overlooked, or why the city’s fund balance fell by an unexpected $800,000 at the close of fiscal 2004, roughly double the amount that seems attributable to the Embassy Square overruns.
We also don’t know whether the city will ever get back the $1.8 million it fronted the Embassy Square Foundation, which has no particular motivation under its contract with the city to work to raise that money, and we don’t know whether the city has plans to accommodate the year-to-year expense of running the facilities the foundation plans to build and deed to Henderson (the library’s operational costs are projected to double, and it’s anyone’s guess what the theater will cost).
Other important questions remain:
* How will the city government incorporate this newly activated electorate into the budget process?
* Will the City Council make open forums a regular, perhaps monthly, feature of its meetings, addressing some of the problems in managing the time for speakers during council sessions and building on Monday’s event and on the Speak Up Henderson forums Mayor Clem Seifert held in each of the four wards?
* Will city officials go line by line through the 2004 accounts to figure out what happened? Will they instead chalk up the mess to experience and simply focus on the future?
* How will we rebuild the fund balance, which as of June 30 was less than have the minimum level sought by the state’s Local Government Commission and only one-tenth of the average for North Carolina cities of Henderson’s size?
* Now that we all know our economic plight and our financial problems, will the plans for Embassy Square beyond the library and the police station be re-evaluated? Or will the foundation insist on pushing ahead with a performing arts center we don’t need and the city persist in planning for a city hall and an administrative building we might not be able to afford for decades?
* Will anyone — city employee or elected official — be held responsible for overspent budgets and the failure to do something as fundamental as amend the budget ordinance to cover a $395,000 change?