HEADLINE: Restructuring delays Chattanooga budget
THE RECAP: The Chattanooga budget is going to be delayed for months because of Mayor Andy Berke’s restructuring of city government and the shuffling of money for new departments. Rather than agreeing to a new budget in June, as is usually the case, the Chattanooga City Council extended the current budget three months and hopes to have the 2013-14 budget in place in late August.
DREW’S VIEW: When a new governor takes office in Tennessee the release of the proposed state budget is customarily pushed back about a month. That allows the new administration extra time to rework the budget to reflect changes in priorities and updates to staffing and government structure.
The state budget is much more complex than the Chattanooga city budget — not to mention more than 150 times bigger. Still, Berke seems overwhelmed with his comparatively small task of presenting a municipal budget and is asking for three times more additional time than a new governor gets to complete his task.
While Mayor Berke’s city government restructuring understandably means a slowdown in the budget process, it’s hard to understand why it will take Berke’s administration three additional months to construct a budget when a governor can overhaul the administrative branch of state government and only delay the state budget by 30 or 40 days.