03/01/2002

Funding - It's been an exciting week and the rest of the legislative session may be pretty exciting too. The news from Nashville has not been very encouraging recently. The TML legislative conference Monday and Tuesday was very active. I'm not ready to relax yet, but please understand that things are not nearly as bad as they sound.

A little history review might be helpful. In 1991, the Governor's budget proposed a $200,000 cut to our funding. The purpose we were told was to get the cities' attention. It got their attention and the funding was restored before the budget was adopted. In 1997, based on the recommendations of the MTAS advisory committee and the TML Board of Directors the legislature approved changing our share of the cities' share of the state sales tax from .75% to 1%. This resulted in about a $500,000 annual increase to our budget. In 2001, there was a short lived proposal to completely eliminate our budget. Many of us asked city officials to make calls to Nashville and the proposal disappeared.

Now, in 2002 we have another situation. Two bills were proposed - one by Rep. Kisber in the House last week and one by Sen. Kyle in the Senate this week - that would eliminate our state funding. MTAS is a small part of both bills. In Sen. Kyle's bill, for example, he proposes $774, 666, 000 in cuts. That's three-quarters of a BILLION DOLLARS! Our share is $1,369,600 or less than two tenths of one percent of the total. While that's not much on a statewide basis, it is 36.7% of our total budget.

Our response to this is based on a two part strategy - one for the short term and one for the long term.

In the short term, please understand, this will not happen. The reaction of TML and city officials to this proposal has been overwhelming. They will not let it pass. If it even sounds like either of these bills is moving forward in the legislative process, we will work with our customers to make sure that our funding remains secure. Frankly, with the support we have from city officials, we probably won't need to do this, but I don't think we need to act overconfident.

If you can believe today's newspaper, the reaction from all parts of the state to the two DOGS budgets has been so strong that some members of both the House and the Senate are now considering amendments to the state sales tax to include services. I don't know if any of this will pass, but it's encouraging that the Legislature is trying to develop a revenue plan rather than only cutting spending.

Our long term response is a little more complicated. We are beginning to look at ways to transition from the state funding in our budget to local funding. It is too early to make any final decisions. If the long term policy of the state is to move us from state to local funding, then we want to get ahead of the curve and have a plan in place. If the state is able to resolve it's revenue problems, then we will be able to maintain the 53 year partnership between state and local government that created MTAS in 1949.

PLEASE NOTE - The only reason we will be successful with both our short or long term strategy is because we have the support of city officials. And that support is earned by the service you provide them each and every day. So, please let me and the management team worry about all these budget permutations and you keep worrying about providing excellent service to cities. That's what got us here and that's what will keep us here.

THANKS.