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Here is another fact that was discovered at the budget hearing tonight:

We discovered that the city was not telling the truth were they testified to a large reduction in the healthcare budget for active police officers as a result of the new Health Savings Accounts introduced that costed taxpayer almost $600,000 this year.

What they presented was a revised budget estimate for this fiscal year (2013) of $3,410,733 and used it as the base for comparison to the fisal 2014 budget of $3,276,892.

On it face it appears that there is a savings of about $134,000.

But the fact is that the orginal budgeted cost for the police healthcare for FY13 was $2,765,543. And the actual cost for FY13 is the $3,410,733, overbudgted by $645,190 or 23%. The city somehow found the additional $600K necessary to transfer to cover the overage this year.

When you compare the FY14 figure of $3,276,892 to the FY13 of $2,765,543, the cost actually increases another $511,349.

So for the two years about $1.1 million in additional tax dollars will be required to fund that one line item.

The reason this occured is that the city chnaged from a self-insured to fully insured program and added the $600K expense for the Health Savings Accounts without performing the proper analysis to determine if it would actually save money.

This alone would account for a large portion of the additional funding the schools are requesting.

BTW: school healthcare costs are now less then city costs. Overall 4% increase in school healthcare costs over the past 10 years while city costs are up by about 70%.

So agian the question is, "Who has done a better job of controlling costs, City or Schools?" The answer is pretty clear.

From: Schools to press for budget

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