A half hour into Jackson’s final budget meeting Wednesday, Councilmember Vernon Hartley wanted to know if — out of the hundreds of millions of dollars the city council was poised to pass in the annual budget — the city could allocate $2.5 million to blight control equipment. 

Pieter Teeuwissen, the chief administrative officer, leaned down from the dais to speak with one of his employees before offering a counter: That would work if Hartley dropped the number by a million. 

“No sir,” Hartley said.

Then Teeuwissen explained his hesitation: Like many officials in the council chambers, he lacked confidence in the accuracy of the city’s proposed budget book. 

“All this is numbers that none of us are willing to build our own financial houses on,” he said. “So I don’t want you allocating money beyond what my finance people say they are comfortable with.”

The uncertainty stems from the city’s failure to keep up with its audited financial statements — something many cities and towns across Mississippi struggle to execute. This concern led Mayor John Horhn’s administration to recommend the Jackson City Council adopt a generally flat budget this year. 

On Wednesday, the council passed the roughly $337 million budget, up from $325 million last year, Teeuwissen said, a difference that is due to the infusion of one-time funds, not substantial growth in the city’s general fund. 

Hartley ended up dropping his proposal by a million as Teeuwissen asked. Other changes the council made to Horhn’s proposed budget included amendments from Councilman Kenneth Stokes to give a discretionary raise for the lowest-paid city employees and add an additional $1 million to the police and fire departments after the city completes the back-due audits. One proposal that failed would have forced the administration to pay the zoo’s water bills.

“We need to show some money in this budget that’s just not fluff, not just some money in the sky that ain’t there,” Stokes said. 

Council President Brian Grizzell said after the meeting that due to the late audits, the council does not know how much money the city has in its fund balance. He described his level of confidence in the budget he had just passed as “moderate” and added he hoped to have more time to look at the numbers next year. 

“We haven’t passed an audit since I’ve been in office,” Grizzell said. “It’s always just been a really good guess.” 

To remedy that, Teeuwissen told Mississippi Today the mayor also hopes to consolidate some of the city’s 11 departments starting Oct. 1, when the new budget takes effect. 

The administration said the mergers, which will include reducing the number of city employees, will help in the event that the budget changes once the city’s audited financial statements are complete. 

“The main thing Jacksonians need to know is that — I’m trying to choose my words carefully — the city, the administration has proposed to the council a flat budget in light of the lack of audited financial data,” Teeuwissen told Mississippi Today. “It is also likely that the city budget will have to decrease during the fiscal year as audited numbers are received now.” 

To complicate matters, the audited financial statements will not answer every question facing the city’s budget, Teeuwissen said.

Take, for instance, longrunning concerns about the impact Jackson’s dwindling population will have on its tax base. Officials do not know the extent to which Jackson is missing out on revenue due to potentially low property tax collection rates, even as the city property tax revenues grew by $2 million to $68 million this year, according to Fidelis Malembeka, the chief financial officer. 

“You might lose population, but somebody’s property values still increase,” Malembeka said after the meeting. 

Overall, the city’s revenues fell by about $8 million from last year to $316 million, Malembeka said, mainly due to a decline in one-time funding. Revenue generally includes permits and fees, sales tax, grants and non-recurring funding such as the Siemens settlement.

If the administration truly lacked confidence in the city’s budget figures, they would have taken more drastic action than proposing a level budget, said Tina Clay, a council member who represents northwest Jackson.

“If that was the case you need to freeze everything until you get the audit,” she told Mississippi Today. 

Teeuwissen said the administration will be focusing on sensibly organizing city government, such as reinstituting monthly meetings with department-level fiscal officers, reviewing the finance department’s recordkeeping methods and moving services so they fall within the same department. 

“Right now, we do grass-cutting by contract, grass-cutting by community improvement and grass-cutting by Parks and Rec, and we’re supposed to have right-of-way maintenance by Public Works,” he said. “Three different departments and contractors all supposedly doing some version of the same thing but we really don’t have the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing.” 

The council on Tuesday passed a resolution supporting the mayor’s goal of consolidating and merging departments. Another way the city is attempting to coordinate efforts around infrastructure projects is an agreement approved Tuesday to share resources between the city and county, Clarion Ledger reported.

Councilman Kevin Parkinson told Mississippi Today he was relieved to know that the budget is not the end-all, be-all of the city’s spending power, as it can receive more revenue throughout the year in one-time payments, such as a $1 million grant the council accepted Tuesday from Jackson State University for beautification. 

“I think there’s many people, myself being one of them, that says as much as we want to re-examine everything from the ground up, I don’t know if we can start with a blank sheet of paper in a couple of months and meet the deadline that we have legally,” Parkinson said. 

The city’s budget needed to be finalized before Sept. 15. Over the past week, council members heard budget requests from individual city departments. Some of the needs included helping the community improvement division tackle blight, such as streetlights that are out across the city, improving police technology and purchasing new patrol vehicles, and reopening the Sykes Community Center. 

But moves like that depend on coordination across the system — which, an exchange toward the end of the council meeting illustrated, is lacking in Jackson. 

In an effort to help the legal department, which was considering moving buildings due to HVAC issues, Foote proposed the city put an additional $1 million into the fund for the care and maintenance of public buildings. 

Then Foote learned from Sharon Thames, the deputy chief financial officer, that Jackson already has $710,000 for HVAC repairs set aside in a different fund, one that’s for the “repair and replacement” of city infrastructure. 

Thames explained the monies weren’t listed in the budget book where Foote had looked.

“I mean, this is crazy, people are packing up and getting ready to move when we have money in our budget,” Foote responded. “We’re not communicating well across the system if the money is there, and then we’re being told by the legal department they have to move out because the money to fix their HVAC isn’t there?”

“I mean, to kind of answer your question on the legal (department), that building belongs to JRA (Jackson Redevelopment Authority), not to the city of Jackson,” Thames said. 

“JRA belongs to the city of Jackson,” Foote shot back. Clay shook her head and other council members laughed. 

“Well, yeah, but they don’t like to share their money,” Thames quipped.

(JRA Director Christopher Pike told Mississippi Today Thursday that his agency, a partner to the city, deploys its funding on programming and building maintenance — it’s not as much a matter of not sharing as it is having limited resources — and that it stands ready to assist with these concerns).

Teeuwissen chimed in. 

“As a practical matter I’m with you,” he said to Foote. “If that money was available, that should have been clear so y’all could decide how to address the problem or how to proceed.”

“Somebody in the chain of command needs to know there’s $750,000,” Foote said. 

“Councilman Foote, there’s been no chain of command,” Teeuwissen responded.