Troy has an ongoing record of epic overspending on police and firefighter overtime, and ignores its own budget by continuing to hire more part-time employees than it has money to pay. What that means is that (a) administration and council people are inept budgeters, and (b) they are even worse as managers.
When you practice this sort of financial cliff-walking and have the state looking over your collective shoulder and threatening to take over the city's finances -- again -- there's a problem. You begin grasping at straws because you are too incompetent to remedy the situation.
One of the straws is a proposal by the city to raise the fees it charges the Troy Downtown Business Improvement District (BID) for helping it ... well, improve downtown business. You know, the lifeblood of a community when its tax base keeps eroding?
The BID, a non-government organization -- that alone qualifies it for credibility -- made its mark under founding director Elizabeth Young Jojo and continues to be relevant under the direction of Erin Pihlaja and special events/marketing coordinator Danielle Roberts. If you're not familiar with the organization, you probably are familiar with the events it co-hosts with the city to bring thousands of people and even more thousands of dollars to Troy through such things as the Troy Pig Out, Chowderfest, Rockin' On the River, Riverfest, Troy Night Out, Troy Restaurant Week, public art such as the Uncle Sam statue project ... .
You get the point. The city, apparently does not. The same city that is incapable of paving its streets, getting rid of burned-out structures and boarded-up buildings, closing its brazen open air drug markets, that has council members threatening to sue each other for slander, that dithers endlessly on bringing to reality a development project on the former site of City Hall ... yet continues to practice out-of-control spending then searches for pockets to pick to make up the deficit.
The BID is a self-supporting organization devoted to helping businesses small and large thrive in an atmosphere that makes downtown relevant again. It works on a thin $400,000 annual shoestring to achieve what government has failed to do for so many years. The cost to the city treasury? An estimated $63,000, an average of about $170 a day. Hardly a speck in a municipal budget, but with a great bang for the buck.
So, what does the city council propose doing? Including a budget revenue line of $150,000 it would siphon from BID-run events. The problem: If the BID has to pay that kind of money, it won't have as many events, it probably will have to raise vendor registration fees for the events it does have, and, thus, the city won't have as many visitors coming here to spend money.
It's such a simple equation, I'm amazed that even the short-sighted council and administration don't realize it. (Wait. When I re-read that sentence, I'm not amazed. It's par for the course with government in this city.)
BID Executive Director Pihlaja succinctly summed up the situation: “We cannot afford this.”
She said she was blindsided by the proposal. She also said she could get the services the city says cost it $63,000 for roughly half that figure. Given the standard government inefficiency, I believe her.
