Tuesday Night's Common Council Meeting
Earlier today, Gossips reported on a single theme of the Common Council meeting for September 2016. Dan Udell's invaluable video documentation of the meeting is now available and may be viewed by clicking here.
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Regarding the youth program cost overrun contretemps, is it possible those overruns are due to more kids using the program than anticipated rather than poor management or financial projections? Has that question been asked by anyone? If more kids are using the program, that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteThe question has been asked and we believe that the numbers are up over past years. The problem isn't that the number of kids is up, the problem is that there are budget shortfalls -- if the number was up and was being tracked (as appears to be the case) then the management needed to come forward and explain what's going on. Where did all these new kids come from? Do they all live in Hudson (as opposed to having a Hudson mailing address)? The program, to the Council's eyes, is quite opaque. The Finance Committee deputized Mr. Rector and myself to observe the Mayor's review and ensure that the budgets are being adhered to and, probably more importantly, that the budgeting process for the department is rational so that we don't keep repeating these overruns each year. There also seems to have been an unwillingness on the part of management to send workers home when not needed due to bad weather, etc. This needs to be understood as well. All in all, lots of questions to ask and so far no satisfactory answers.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the informative comment John, and good luck in getting this all sorted out, with appropriate systems and oversight in place, so that divisive issue does not continue to stalk our city in the future. As you well know, we already have enough of those issues without having this one on our plate. Given the number of people involved, including part time staff, it might be that managing it all in the most efficient manner is a rather daunting task.
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