"GANG OF FOUR" STRIKE OUT: OPPOSE 1/2 OF ONE PERCENT BUDGET CHANGE TO FIX D+ STREETS

Without a care about residents' suffering from pothole-laden streets, City Commissioners showed they don't give a fig about you or your concerns.
Our City Commission, adopting its FY 2017 budget and millage rate, in a hurry to go to dinner, clicked their heels and did as they were told, adopting a budget drafted by maladroit City Manager JOHN PATRICK REGAN, P.E., refusing to adopt a small change proposed by reform Mayor Nancy Shaver.
Four BOLESIAN Commissioners showed their contempt for democracy and data-based decisions.
Four weak-minded WEEKSIAN Commissioners showed their smugness, spending less than an hour, a million dollars a minute.
At times, the "Gang of Four" resembles the world's worst deliberative body.
Yes, St. Augustine City Commissioners ignored fifty e-mails and eight resident speakers.
The "Gang of Four" Commissioners -- TODD NEVILLE a/k/a "ODD TODD," NANCY SIKES-KLINE, LEANNA FREEMAN and Vice Mayor ROXANNE HORVATH refused, declined and rejected an 0.5% change in the budget to fix our City's failing D+ streets on Thursday, September 21, 2016.


St. Augustine commissioners overrule mayor on budget, support same road spending
Posted: September 22, 2016 - 11:02pm | Updated: September 23, 2016 - 9:39am

By SHELDON GARDNER
sheldon.gardner@staugustine.com
St. Augustine commissioners gave final approval to next fiscal year’s budget, which has been challenged by Mayor Nancy Shaver as not doing enough for street paving.

Commissioners still pushed the budget through 4-1 (Shaver dissenting). Commissioner Todd Neville motioned to approve the budget as discussion lingered.

The budget is more than $49.6 million, with adjustments made for transfers within government. Commissioners also approved a millage rate that will stay at 7.5 mills.

Neville provided a detailed explanation of his support for the budget, and why $525,000 slated for “road rehabilitation” — which Shaver has said is inadequate — doesn’t give the full picture.

“I want to talk about what’s really in our budget so that everyone can have a full understanding of that,” Neville said.

He said more than $800,000 has been moved from general government services, or administration, to transportation and infrastructure. Transportation and infrastructure have gone from 12 to 17 percent of the budget year over year, he said.

That shift came through strategic planning, changing the budget process and community feedback over the past couple of years, he said.

He also said a dozen capital projects, worth more than $5 million, will involve paving outside of the $525,000. And total, with both included, the city will pave seven miles of streets of the more than 70 miles they control, he said.

Nancy Sikes-Kline said the city’s seeing major investment in its infrastructure, including paving along U.S. 1 by the Florida Department of Transportation.

City Manager John Regan said after the meeting that the budget is on pace with a 15-year replacement schedule for streets, and the city’s goal is more than four miles of annual asphalt replacement.

“We’re not going to slip our grade,” Regan said of the overall rating of the city’s roads.

He added that "this budget meets our community priorities.”

A 2015 road analysis put the roads around a D grade, and Shaver had said — and maintained Thursday — that the current budget won’t provide enough funding to maintain roads at the level they should be maintained as detailed by the city’s Capital Improvement Plan.

“Our job is to represent the people we serve and it is to provide oversight when approving a budget,” she said at the meeting. “It is not to rubber stamp a budget.”

Commissioners had previously agreed to meet in a few months to review the paving spending.

While the meeting ended without change in the budget, more than a dozen people came to the meeting and several asked for more to be done for roads.

Among them was Deltra Long, a Planning and Zoning Board member.

She said, “When we were in grade school and we made A’s and B’s on our report card we went home excited. … We should get that same level of enthusiasm for the grades that we’ve been earning for our roads. … If you have the money in available areas, let’s use it for the upgrading of our streets, the pavements and upgrade the sidewalks and whatever needs to be done to make us proud residents in earning A and B grades not D [and lower].”