A New Initiative from the Mayor

According to the Register-Star, Mayor William Hallenbeck is proposing that, twice a year, residents be allowed to put junked appliances, furniture, mattresses, old tires, and other "bulk items" at the curb for the Department of Public Works to pick up free of charge: "Mayor looks to start up bulk item day." Currently, such items are picked up only once a year, and anyone who wants DPW to haul these things away must make arrangements in advance and pay a fee. The mayor wants this service offered twice a year, and he wants it to be free.

The mayor sees this as a quality of life issue. "The charge for the service reduces the amount of participants, allowing for the items to be dumped illegally in alleys and yards, creating unsafe and dangerous conditions." DWP superintendent Rob Perry is quoted in the article as saying "he imagined the service would be 'extremely expensive,' possibly $10,000 to $20,000, because of the large amount of dumping to be expected if there were no threat of punishment."

The mayor, however, in a statement quoted twice in the article, thinks the City can well afford it because of our healthy fund balance: "We have generated a lot of revenue and increased our fund balance substantially over my terms as a mayor. It's time we give a little relief to our residents."

That statement raises some questions. The mayor makes much of his success in holding the line on property taxes--"keeping our taxes low," as some of his supporters like to put it, although most Hudson property owners would complain that our taxes are hardly low. The mayor fought mightily to prevent the Common Council from raising an additional $70,000 in property taxes in 2015 to help create a capital reserve fund to pay for anticipated expenses not far down the road--replacing the Ferry Street Bridge and buying a new ladder truck for the fire department. So how, in three years of the current mayor's administration, did we end up with $1 million more in the fund balance? Were property owners in Hudson taxed $1 million more than was actually needed to run the City? That hardly seems likely.

During the discussion surrounding the 2015 budget and the capital reserve fund at a Common Council meeting in November, city treasurer Heather Campbell explained that a fund balance "is not a pool of money just sitting there." She equated a fund balance with shareholders' equity. "If you sold everything you had and paid all that you owed, what would be left over is the fund balance." If you Google fund balance, you find the same information. This from the Governmental Accounting Standards Board: "Most simply, fund balance is the difference between assets and liabilities in a governmental fund."

It's probably a mistake to think that the City has an extra million dollars someplace, burning a hole in the municipal pocket, but even if it were true, does it make sense to spend even a small part of the money in this way? How much "relief" would this actually provide the property owners of Hudson? How often does the average household find it necessary to discard a refrigerator or a mattress or tires? And would the people who dump such things in out-of-the-way places around town really wait until the designated day to put it out on the street, even if that day happened twice a year and the discarded item would be hauled away for free?

According to the article, "The mayor said he's asking the Common Council to do a feasibility study prior to approving the cleanup days."
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