When times get tough, when costs begin outpacing wages, conventional wisdom goes that a family needs to identify and cut wasteful spending to balance their budget or risk financial ruin.
For fiscal conservatives, the same is true of a county or city budget. It’s certainly the mindset of Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp. Last week, the mayor announced the findings of his DOGE-inspired task force, one set on reducing waste within the county budget.
Recommendations from the task force included the sale of the county’s M.L. King building and work force cuts of 21 positions described as “chronically vacant.” All-in-all, Wamp’s team identified nearly $80 million in cost savings over the next decade.
That $80 million figure sounds like a big number, but upon closer inspection, the costs savings don’t add up to much. Spread out over the next decade, that’s about $8 million of extra cash annually. Again, that’s a large amount, but at under 1% of Wamp’s proposed $1.1 billion budget – roughly two thirds of which is for K-12 public schools – it hardly makes a dent.
Wamp isn’t alone in this cost-cutting fiscal approach. After Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly said he’d return later this year to ask for a budget amendment to fund higher salaries for first responders, city council member Chip Henderson said at a council meeting that the city should “take a haircut” – cut spending – instead of raising taxes to fund such a pay raise.