Lino Lakes Poised To Cut City Budget By $500,000

Roughly $300,000 of that half-million dollars in budget cuts will come from a proposed reduction in city staff of 5.0 FTE (full-time equivalent) employee positions, half the reduction initially discussed at an August workshop.

Under that earlier scenario, 10.0 FTEs, or approximately 13% of the city’s 80 staff positions, would have been cut. However, council directed City Finance Director Al Rolek to explore other options such as mandatory two-week employee furloughs and the elimination of wage increases, steps that Reinert has termed “temporary solutions.”

Urging fellow council members at the workshop to deal with budget issues in ways “that can help us longterm,” Reinert requested that the group work together to define an overriding budget goal and implement solutions that can be counted on when the process begins again in 2010. Elimination of city staff positions is “something we only want to do once,” he said.

Referring to the current budget proposal as a “box of Band-Aids,” Reinert continued, “To continue to do things the way we do things with the current outlook and then expect different results is the definition of insanity,” he said. “What a sad situation to know that the problems aren’t solved and that we have to go through this again next year.”
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Deb Barnes, The Citizen