City of Austin's Budget Simulator Puts You in the Cockpit

Think you've got the chops to solve City of Austin's budget woes? They've put up a "Budget Simulation Exercise" that lists a slew of areas, from Library and Police to Watershed Protection and Health & Human Services, where sources of increased revenue are possible. The point of the exercise is to come up with at least $9.3 million in savings or new revenue, though even this falls well shy of the estimated $30-43 million shortfall that the current 2010 budget faces.

Some options in the simulator could have a big impact—for example, cutting special pay incentives that are added to some firefighters' base salaries (for things like certifications and continuing education) would save a whopping $1.73 million. Similarly, if City of Austin scrapped next year's police cadet training and kept the current police force vacancy rate at 10% or more, it could mean savings of over $5 million. On the lower end of the scale, smaller items like cutting back on city maintenance (pest control, fence repair) or eliminating some drop-in summer programs for neighborhood youth at city parks would net savings in the region of $100k to $250k.

At last month's Budget Town Hall meetings, the general consensus among the public was that closing nine of the more underused or neglected city pools, as well as charging more for city-funded services, was preferable to cutting back existing funding for services like the library and police. Some attendees pitched the same idea of charging a modest admission fee for the annual Trail of Lights that was earlier raised in our comments section. Most also seemed to be comfortable with increasing parking fines from the current $15 "early" rate to $20, which could net the city an extra $270k.

The proposed budget is expected to be delivered by July 22. In the meantime, the budget simulator also works as a last-ditch effort to solicit feedback from the community—in addition to gauging the relative efficacy of different revenue generators, the simulator allows you to share your preferred scenarios with the City's Communication and Public Information Office, who'll lump in the results with those collected from the town hall meetings.