Baltimore surplus might not be too far-fetched

A comprehensive report on the state of the Baltimore city government has detailed a number of damning inefficiencies and wastes of financial resources, and has listed a number of steps the city should take to make itself more recession-proof during this time of runaway deficits and plunging income.

The deficit for Baltimore was said by Mayor in her state of the city address to be at $120 million, she described the deficit as “devastating” while city officials have acknowledged that tackling the deficit will be “a killer”.

In light of this, the inefficiencies in government spending, highlighted by the150-member volunteer transition committee are all the more sobering. The team spent several weeks meeting with officials at all levels of government and have found a number of areas in which the city is failing to trim spending or reallocate spending in beneficial ways.

They say that the city should privatize trash collection and send ambulances to medical calls, not fire trucks. It has been found that often a fire truck is dispatched, only to be later recalled so that an ambulance can be sent to deal with the medical problem. They say this is an extreme waste of resources in terms of time, staff and fuel.

They also site an example of one building, owned by the city, and occupied by several departments that all subcontract in different cleaning services, by contracting one company to clean the whole building they could benefit from economies of scale, according to the report.

This example forms part of the basis of calls for the city to entirely re-examine how it uses the approximately ten million square feet of office space that it owns in 527 different facilities, the report suggests that many offices and departments could be relocated into single buildings, which would reduce overhead costs.

The report has also called on the city to find additional ways of generating revenue, by removing the exemption of non-profits from property tax, for example, and placing a tax of bottles and other containers.

It is not all doom and gloom in Baltimore’s finances, however, for the city announced recently that it plans to save around $6 million per year by rerouting its garbage disposal fleet. The city government says this can be done through the use of new computer software that examines the current routes taken by 63 garbage trucks to 160,000 homes twice a week and finds more efficient ways of routing the fleet, thereby saving money on fuel, maintenance, and working hours for staff.

The $6 million savings in a budget of $2.2 billion may seem small, but if the city successfully manages to save that money, it would account for 5% of the deficit. Logically then, if every department of the city government looked into ways of saving a few million dollars each year, the deficit problem would be solved, and as the recession abates, Baltimore may eventually have a substantial surplus to spend on new investments in important areas like education.