Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole requested that the city auditor conduct a broader review of her department’s overtime spending after it was disclosed in a recent Office of Police Accountability report that officers were inaccurately reporting their overtime hours in the Education and Training Section — in one case, an officer received 31.5 hours of overtime for a day’s work. The report uncovered the department’s lax “systems and procedures” and more than $1 million in misspent city funds.
The city’s Human Services Department is facing a similar situation with its distribution of federal grant money — over each of the last four years. A new state auditor’s report identified $2.7 million in costs in 2013 that didn’t have “adequate supporting documentation,” according to The Seattle Times.
A new performance-based system for how the city keeps track of its spending wouldn’t be in place for a couple of years, Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess told The Seattle Times.
Then there was Metropolitan King County Council’s announcement that it was canceling any further bus-service cuts until the county approves a new, two-year budget. This came just two days after the first round of cuts went into effect. Two more rounds of scheduled cuts next year had been promised as a result of the failure of Proposition 1 last April, until the county recently learned it should have higher sales-tax revenues because of the quickly growing population. Still, the city is keeping its proposition on this November’s ballot to help prevent any more cuts to bus routes serving Seattle.
Seattle is also proactively scaling back its waterfront redevelopment plan to keep the mounting costs to the original $1.07 billion target set in 2012. The target budget includes funding for the new Elliott Bay seawall, refurbished public piers, a rebuilt Alaskan Way and a new waterfront park, as well as other projects. With the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel stalled and the viaduct now not scheduled for demolition until at least 2017, the city is trimming its plans to not only pay for cost overruns from the two construction projects but planning for inflation — ultimately aiming for $168 million in cuts.
Lesser projects — such as the renovation of a pedestrian bridge or full replacement of Piers 62 and 63 — were either simplified or postponed. But one project that should have never made it past the idea phase was a $25 million seasonal swimming-pool barge on Elliott Bay. If it was initially deemed a vital component to the waterfront plan, then there are other impractical ideas that, surely, can be eliminated to save taxpayers’ dollars.
It’s disdainful that our government leaders could misspend any of our money; it’s incredulous that it could be done so blatantly to this extent.