Council Sweeps Differences Under the Rug, Breaks Millbrae’s Budget Impasse

The carpeting still needs some work, but the real heavy lifting is now over.

With an end-of-the-month deadline hanging over their heads, the Millbrae City Council on Tuesday night ended a seven-week impasse, unanimously passing a budget for the 2012-2013 fiscal year.

The council approved the budget after finally getting the answers they needed from the city’s finance director and about a half hour of talk about small stuff.

The deliberations included budget items such as carpet replacement and special council training– items that would cost the city $25,000 – an all but statistically insignificant percentage of a budget of more than $18 million.

In the end, the council decided to forgo a $19,000 tab for replacing the recreation center’s community room carpeting, but agreed to eat the $6,000 in special training for items such as helping council members understand nuances of government laws such as the Brown Act that could save the city big money in legal costs in the long run.

“I’m very pleased that our council approved a budget unanimously,” Millbrae Mayor Marge Colapietro said just before walking into a closed-door session addressing labor negotiations.

The council was also unanimous in its agreement with the mayor that the city was better off fixing the heavily-used Dave Chetcuti Room’s carpeting on the cheap rather than replacing it with tiles that would probably get trashed within a few years anyway.

Colapietro said she spent nearly an hour thoroughly inspecting the carpeting and found 234 cleanable splotches and about 20 strands of ripped up fabric for which she “found an easy solution that I would do myself.”

“When my rug has a little threaded fabric hanging out, I just separate it, tie it, double-knot as close to the carpet as I can and then I just snip the top off. It works perfectly well. It just goes back together.”

Colapietro acknowledged that springing for new carpeting wouldn’t trigger a fiscal crisis, but said she “took this matter very seriously” because she believes the council needs to accountable to its citizenry for all its expenditures.

“Just because we have some money to spend it doesn’t mean we have to spend it when some alterations” will work just as well, she said.

The budget deal also provided a measure of relief for Finance Director LaRae Brown.

Summoned for a fourth study session, Brown finally provided the council the answers it needed to hear to move on a budget deal, even though the numbers themselves were no different than what was submitted in a preliminary budget report she submitted on April 24.

Multiple factors delayed delivery of the 2011-2012 midyear budget numbers the council had asked for, including the outsourcing of law enforcement services to the sheriff’s department, losing two members of her six-person staff (one retired and another quit), the installation of a new payroll system, and a shoulder surgery that left her without use of her right arm for about 10 days.

Asked who was to blame for the communication glitches between her and the council that were at the center of the budget impasse, Brown said she didn’t believe it was an entirely fair question, but that in the end it was on her.

“I feel if I didn’t explain it well enough then I definitely want to answer all my council questions,” she said.

“I guess I didn’t present it well enough the first three times.”

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