6:17 p.m.:
Community Development Director Mike Niblock’s budget is proposed to be reduced 25 percent, to $8.4 million. Its number of employees is to be reduced from 88 to 48.
More than half an hour later and he is still going, the City Council taken aback (and engaging in some discussion) about a negative balance of $3.3 million in the Development Services Fund. To carry a negative balance is “in effect borrowing from the available cash” in the city, Chief Financial Officer Mark Moses said, and with that some council members appeared to be uncomfortable. More preferable, council members said, would be a formal loan. It is unclear from where that loan would come. City Manager Gordon Palmer said the administration will prepare an alternative such as council members requested.
It is just after 7 p.m. and Niblock is done. Up next is Moses and the Administrative Services Department, including finance and information technology.