TKC EXCLUSIVE!!! GUEST BLOGGER BRUTUS NOTES A $10 MILLION DOLLAR GAP IN THE NEW KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI BUDGET AND MAYBE MORE CITY HALL LAYOFFS!!!

TKC Note: A guest blogger/contributor has some VERY IMPORTANT KANSAS CITY FINANCIAL NEWS this morning and I'm glad this blogger with a widely renowned codename could offer some perspective. As election season draws closer, this town's finances will come into play more often and Kansas City will have to decide who they trust holding the purse strings. A special thanks for the EXTREMELY INFORMATIVE GUEST POST that isn't great news for folks lucky enough to still draw a check at City Hall. Check it:

MORE LAYOFFS POSSIBLE AT CITY HALL! CHAOS REIGNS AGAIN.

The current budget for fiscal year 2010/11 which was just passed by the Mayor and Council two months ago is already in crisis. A gapping hole is opening up in the budget which will likely lead to more layoffs this summer.

At the time of passage the Mayor hailed it as a great budget and praised his Finance and Budget Committee Chair Deb Hermann as the "best Finance Chair the City has ever had". It was Troy Schulte's first budget as the acting City Manager.

The first shoe to drop was on April 14 when the new budget director Mark Toma-Perry and new Finance Director Randy Landes reported to the Finance Committee that property tax collections "fell off the table" and there was now a $4 million shortfall in the just passed budget. Hermann seemed to take it in stride, but City Hall insiders noted that had this shocking surprise gone down under her nemesis, former Manager Wayne Cauthen, she would have become apoplectic and called for his head.

In a May 4 memo to the City Manager and Council obtained exclusively for TKC readers, Landes backed away from his claim that the budget hole was caused by a drop in collections, but instead a serious budgeting error by the Staff.

Landes wrote; "Hindsight being perfect, I should not have used the phrase "fell off the table," with regard to this year's property tax collection efforts. That phrase was more a summary of staff's internal frustration of determining the exact causes of the decline rather than an appropriate metaphor regarding property tax collections".

In the heretofore secret email Landes admitted it was a staff error when he wrote; "...property tax collections have generally never been an area of much surprise or angst for the City's budget. I believe that there must have been a methodological flaw or change in our decades old process, which occurred during the current fiscal year."

Next came the recently passed bond issue rammed through by the Mayor on a 10-2 vote. Hermann and her constant side kick Bill Skaggs voted against it because she knew there was no allocation in the current budget for the debt service for the bonds which could be as high as $6 million a year.

So now there is a $10 million hole in the new budget.

If that were not enough the Council did not account, according to those in the know, for the debt service for the city funded parking garage in the East Village. That could add another $2 million expense to this year's budget.

So when the smoke clears the current budget, less than 2 months old, has a whopping $12 million shortfall. So we already have in this year's original budget a 10% property tax increase, an increase in fees residents have to pay for trash pick up, and layoffs. Now possibly even more layoffs are on the table which means further reductions in city basic services.

Does not sound like "smart with the money" and the owner of that campaign slogan, the Funk, went along for the ride on all of it.

The City staff has a little egg on their face for the poor property tax estimates, but the rest they inherited.

So staff layoffs are the usual remedy for budget deficits of this magnitude.

It is always the little guy and gal that pays for the mistakes made upstairs.