Dear Colleagues,
In preparation for tomorrow’s city council meeting, you may have received the opinions of council attorney Rob Frost and city law director Charles Swanson. I have replied to their opinions in a memo attached to this forum post. If you have any trouble accessing or downloading the attachment, city recorder Will Johnson can share a copy with you.
I continue to hold the opinion that the charter does not preclude council from making any line item amendments to the mayor’s budget. I have shared my memo with multiple attorneys and all at this point have agreed with my analysis.
I believe the issue is our city’s reliance on an old law director opinion. That opinion (which is linked in my response) does not address the appropriations ordinance that governs how appropriations are made to community agencies. Once an appropriation is made by council to a community agency, the mayor is not able to decide later to increase the appropriation and reduce the appropriation of another agency. The mayor would need to come back before council. Mr. Swanson and Mr. Frost are relying on the former law director’s opinion that because the mayor can move money within a department without council action, then any line item amendment attempt by council would be negated. However, that’s not true in all situations and community agency grants would be one of the situations when the mayor can not simply move money around to different nonprofits once money has been appropriated by council to a specific nonprofit.
The resolution I introduced only addresses council’s authority to make line item amendments within the mayor’s proposed budget ordinance to community agency grants. I believe we have this authority and that the amended budget ordinance that I introduced in May is an example of an amended budget ordinance that council has the authority to adopt.
I look forward to tomorrow’s discussion,
Amelia
Council’s Line Item Budget Amendment Authority
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Council’s Line Item Budget Amendment Authority
- Attachments
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- CM Parker response to July 30 opinions.pdf
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