Anthony Piagentini
abpiagentini@gmail.com
February 16, 2014
Mayor Greg Fischer
Metro Hall
4th Floor
527 W. Jefferson Street
Louisville, KY 40202
Dear Mayor Fischer,
This open letter to you will be one of many in which I detail the failure of your administration to properly manage the city budget of Louisville. As a concerned citizen, I am aware that the average citizenry typically misses local abuses of power in favor of more scandalous episodes perpetrated by national politicians. I believe you, like many local politicians before you, have taken the opportunity to mismanage Louisville’s budget to the detriment of it’s citizenry.
I am further concerned about the complete lack of scrutiny your annual budgets receive even by the city’s renown local media. For example, I tried googling any criticism of any budget you have put forward over your 3 years in office and I have yet to find a piece of substantive journalism that sufficiently pokes holes in your fiscal management. Frankly, this is probably primarily due to the boring nature of budgetary discussions in media (they don’t exactly sell newspapers) but I would hope that honest journalists might help take up the cause of being the public’s investigator, no matter who the administration is or their bias in favor of it.
As an example of your failure, today I will focus on one line of your budget and that is the expenditure related to Codes and Regulations. Although your 2013-2014 budget seems to be a stabilization from the 2012-2013 budget, since 2011, this line item has increased by 28%. This is the department that one must navigate to get permits for construction, zone the city, manage specialty licenses, and enforce codes and ordinances.
Although this is a necessary function of local government, it is also the agency typically most synonymous with stifling private sector growth through bureaucracy. In that same period (January 2011 to November 2013), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Louisville has only increased its total workforce by 1.4% and total output by approximately 6% (output was measured from 2011 to 2012 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis). Doesn’t this growth rate in this one line item seem disproportionately high compared to the growth in jobs or the local economy? Further, when examining the department’s performance on LouieStat, they missed 5 objectives, didn’t measure at least two goals properly, and accomplished 2 goals. That is a 22% success rate. With a 28% increase in expenditure in 2 years, where is the return on investment?
Frankly Mr. Mayor, this is the smallest of your budget failures as future letters will document. The greater issues are your personnel cost growth, healthcare cost growth, and debt expansion. I again want to reiterate my hope that others will join with me in holding you and your administration accountable for failing to deliver on a stable metro budget. Only by shining the light on this topic might we begin to right the ship that you have continued to take off course following a line of Democrat mayors who have clearly had no problem haphazardly spending our money.
Sincerely yours,
Anthony Piagentini
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