Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson signaled this week that he could veto at least part of the city’s newly amended fiscal year 2015 budget, taking issue with a City Council decision to redirect $2.5 million originally earmarked for police and fire equipment toward retiree health care costs.
Speaking at a news conference on the budget, Stimpson stopped short of threatening a sweeping rejection of the council’s amendments, which passed while he was out of town in Washington, D.C. Instead, he said he plans to resume negotiations with council members early next week, hoping to settle remaining disagreements before his veto window closes at the end of the following week. The city’s fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
“We’re down to having differences on a small amount of money,” Stimpson told reporters, adding that both sides had made “tremendous progress” since budget talks began.
Much of the disagreement centers on how the city pays for capital needs versus retiree benefits. Stimpson’s original proposal set aside roughly $3.2 million for 100 new police cruisers, $2 million for fire-rescue vehicles, and $750,000 for public works vehicles. The council’s amendment pulled $2.5 million of city capital funding into the General Fund to help cover rising retiree health care costs, a move Stimpson said caught his administration off guard.
“I don’t think the council was recognizing what was happening there,” Stimpson said, adding that members had not fully understood that the shifted money was coming out of public safety funding.
The mayor also weighed in on the council’s decision to extend Mobile’s temporary penny sales tax by three years rather than the roughly two-month extension his administration had requested. Stimpson said he would have preferred the council revisit the tax annually rather than lock in a multiyear extension, arguing that an additional percentage point on the sales tax generates more than $30 million a year for the city and deserves regular public scrutiny. He said he raised that preference directly with council members in private meetings, though several officials, including Council President Gina Gregory and Councilman Fred Richardson, indicated they understood his position differently.
Separately, council members added back funding for local nonprofit agencies whose performance contracts had been cut in the mayor’s original budget, following pushback from groups warning the cuts could cripple their operations. Nonprofits set to receive some of that restored funding include community health and social service providers that rely heavily on the city’s annual contracts to continue operating.
Stimpson indicated he was unlikely to challenge the council’s roughly $5.2 million allocation for those nonprofit performance contracts, even as he continues to weigh a possible veto on the retiree health care transfer. City officials said further budget talks were expected in the days ahead as both the mayor’s office and the council work to finalize the spending plan before the new fiscal year begins.