If you had a $30,000 annual slush fund courtesy of someone else, what would you do?
If you were Orlando city commissioner Daisy Lynum, you'd travel. A lot. You'd fly to places like Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, going to conferences and staying in top-flight hotels, all on the taxpayers' dime. In a two-year period, you'd rack up at least $22,538 in travel expenses.
If you were commissioner Sam Ings, you'd spend more than $31,000 over a two-year period on your city-issued Visa, including parties in the city's Amway Arena skybox, $350-plus bills at soul food restaurant Mama Nems' and trips.
In the abstract, these numbers represent a miniscule portion of the city's $359 million annual general fund budget. But at a time when Mayor Buddy Dyer is threatening to lay off cops and firefighters to plug a $40 million budget deficit, looking at how the city's six commissioners spend their travel and community funds sheds light on how they view their stewardship of public money.
As it turns out, some are much thriftier than others.
If their planned 3 percent pay raise goes through for the 2009-2010 budget, commissioners each will earn $49,383 for a part-time job; total compensation for each is between $130,000 and $150,000, including a salary and benefits for their aides. In addition to the salary and benefits packages awarded to commissioners, each gets two pots of money to spend as they please: a district budget and a capital improvement project fund, or CIP.
The CIP is fixed at $100,000 per year per district. If the commissioners don't spend it, what's left rolls over, which is why District 1 commissioner Phil Diamond had more than $450,000 in his CIP account at the end of 2008, according to city records. This money pays for things like speed bumps, brick street restorations and, in one case, a $4,420 "Lake Eola swan statue pedestal." These are minor projects that benefit constituents.
Each commissioner's district budget, on the other hand, is divvied up into pots of money for travel, community expenses and supplies. Commissioners don't all get the same amount of money in their district budgets. District 3 commissioner Robert Stuart's district budget is $22,539. Ings' budget is more than double that: $48,679 in the current fiscal year. Lynum comes a close second with a $45,671 district budget. Besides Lynum and Ings, no commissioner's district budget is more than $26,000, according to city records.
For the four commissioners on the low end of the spectrum, supplies and other operating expenses eat up half of their budgets. For instance, of Stuart's $22,539, $13,610 is dedicated to supplies. For Ings and Lynum, however, supplies constitute a much lower proportion, roughly 20 percent.
Whereas Diamond has $13,000 set aside in his community fund and nothing for travel, Ings has $20,610 for events and another $11,039 in his travel fund. Lynum has $15,000 in each pot.
Only one commissioner has lodged an official objection regarding the lopsided pots of money. In a May letter to the mayor, Stuart recommended reducing and evening out the commissioners' district budgets, though he concedes that his suggestion has little chance of passing. According to Stuart's letter, the commissioners' district budgets were fairly uniform up until the 2006-2007 fiscal year. Since then, Ings and Lynum have seen their budgets skyrocket, while the other commissioners' have stayed roughly the same.
The city can't exactly say why that is the case. Spokeswoman Heather Allebaugh says Ings and Lynum requested the increases, and the finance department and city council approved them.
One could argue that Lynum's and Ings' larger budgets are justified because they represent the city's poorest districts. Perhaps that is what Lynum and Ings would have argued, had they returned phone calls and e-mails seeking comment for this story. (All six commissioners were contacted and asked to explain their district-budget expenditures. Only Stuart and Diamond responded. See the accompanying text on pages 12 and 13 for their quotes.)
But what's in it for constituents? Do the residents of District 5 benefit from Lynum's many out-of-state trips? Do the people Ings represents get anything in return when he spends $500 at an Orlando Magic game?
No one who has ever sat through a city council meeting can argue that Ings and Lynum are better informed or offer more critical insights than, say, commissioners Stuart and Patty Sheehan, who travel and spend considerably less. In fact, Lynum frequently misses council meetings because she's out of town, including one on July 13 when she was in Biloxi, Miss.
What follows is a sampling of the non-supplies-related district budget expenses commissioners have accumulated in the last two years; this is not everything they've spent. It's a glimpse into how your money is spent by your elected officials when they are allowed to spend it on just about anything.
