A.G. Gancarski
The Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Jacksonville City Council Capital Improvement Plan Special Committee was not a spectator sport. The CIP committee does a lot of the heavy lifting, respective to giving the larger council guidance on capital improvement projects, debt service, internal controls, cash transfers, and so much more.
There are no discussions in the CIP, in other words, of hot-button issues like hens in yards, cars backing into driveways, or how the prayer should sound before the normal council meeting.
Wednesday’s meeting was no exception. The special committee was launched during the previous administration, and a big reason why was that there was some distance between Council and the Alvin Brown administration on best financial practices. As Lenny Curry ran a campaign and built a veteran team predicated on shoring up financial practices, some interesting practical and philosophical questions are raised.
One such, as chairwoman Lori Boyer posed: whether or not the committee should be held in abeyance until after the budget process, given that the Curry administration is working on a revised debt management policy.
City treasurer Joey Grieve was on hand to discuss debt management and amortization. He mentioned that he is “focused on details” and “glad [the committee] is thinking about these issues.” Grieve has had conversations with Public Financial Management, which offers advice to municipalities including Jacksonville; “feedback has been positive” on Jacksonville’s approach.
Mike Weinstein, Curry’s Chief Financial Officer who was sitting in on the committee on behalf of the administration, was sitting in on a recent call with PFM. He observed their thoughts on “how unique [Jacksonville is] in structure and processes.”
Weinstein described the conversation as “very encouraging” but that Jacksonville’s unique structure leads inexorably to “some different rules” regarding how Jacksonville proceeds fiscally.
Weinstein described the 19 person City Council as an “anomaly” in terms of size, which puts unique pressures on the legislative body, and the city at large.
“Deals come and go very quickly; sometimes it takes a long time” to get deals through the Council cycle, which can run anywhere from two to six weeks. To function effectively, the executive branch would benefit from “flexibility” and a “little more leeway” in terms of negotiating leverage.
This echoes a similar concern from the Jacksonville Chamber regarding Jacksonville’s slow economic development process, which creates a competitive disadvantage. Councilman John Crescimbeni observed that “maybe we need some sort of fast track process” for deal making.
A scintillating discussion followed on the scheduling of debt service. Grieve again explained his conception of best practices, saying that it’s not optimal to “kick the can down the road,” and that debt service should be kept as level as possible.
From there, a salient question from Council President Greg Anderson: “Are we getting closer to a AAA rating?”
Grieve noted that there may be progress imminent, as the ratings agencies get “reintroduced” to Weinstein.
Boyer noted that constructive engagement between the Administration and the Council, which was not a hallmark of the preceding four years, “should be viewed very favorably.”
To be sure, constructive engagement should not be mistaken for walking in lockstep. One of the recurrent complaints among insiders the last four years, voiced to this writer by former mayor John Delaney and others, has been that Jacksonville’s City Council has had to do more of the heavy lifting in budgetary regards than the governmental model traditionally allows.
As a result, the “trust but verify” model endures, as evidenced during a discussion of the Reserve Policy, when Anderson referred to “that magic day [during the past administration when] we found out that you can take money from savings and turn it into revenue.”
Though Weinstein cautioned that too fixed a policy would take away “discretion,” the clear feeling of many committee members was that balancing the budget with reserves is a perilous path to take.
I caught up with Weinstein after the meeting. His impressions of the session, and the CIP committee in general were positive.
“Most of these things are good financial management,” Weinstein said, adding that the Council is “trying to make sure that best practices are followed.”
The takeaway from Wednesday’s CIP meeting: Jacksonville’s City Council does have confidence in the Curry administration’s approach to finances. But “trust but verify” prevails.
