Cost increases have peripheral consequences. If there was a theme for the Jan. 10 Page City Council meeting, it was checks and balances verses council micromanagement. 

Tom Geiger, retired from the National Park Service, is a member of Page Utility Enterprises Board. He was chosen to address the council on behalf of the board and PUE. Essentially, Geiger‘s presentation asked to remove unnecessary red tape so board and PUE could operate more efficiently.

The PUE Board, since its inception, was limited to expenditures up to $100,000, while the PUE manager’s spending was capped at $20,000.

Those following council meetings are familiar with the city’s various departments requesting funds for equipment and services. It could be buying updated radio equipment for the police or fire departments, replacing a ragged liner for a water treatment pond, or purchasing a used truck for city maintenance workers.

Usually, these items are already included in the council approved budget, yet they go before council because of spending caps. The city manager for example, like PUE’s manager, can’t authorize more than $20,000 without council approval. 

PUE Manager Bryan Hill gave perspective when he told the Chronicle, “The transformer for the Kentucky Fried Chicken cost $159,000.”

The PUE Board recommended raising manager spending authority to $300,000 before seeking board approval and raising board spending authority to $600,000 before seeking council approval. While the council unanimously approved the increase, comments made throughout the meeting suggest future changes are needed to adapt to rising costs and department efficiency.

After Bryan Hill spoke about the costs of seeking grants for water infrastructure, counselor Brian Carey said, “These are big-picture items that I would love the Utility Board to be really focused on now that we've freed them from micromanagement.”

Carey said he’d like to see the PUE Board focus more on larger, critical concerns, like getting a second water pipeline built from Lake Powell.

“I agree with Councilor Carey,” said Page Mayor Bill Diak. “We’ve got a problem here that I think that we don’t allow our departments to function as efficiently as I believe they should and can. As a part of our system, we do a budget, and as long as that expenditure fits within that budget, we shouldn’t tell our managers how to spend it.”

Citing the council’s redundant vote on the purchase of three new police vehicles, Diak said, “We look at the budgets we go over them, and like this evening, those three cars that we just bought. We budgeted them over several years and what that should have been is we spent the money. There shouldn’t have been a vote for that at all because that’s exactly what we did in our budget process. We approved it and we talked about those various expenditures. So why does it come back here and take us another 10 or 15 minutes? We need to change how we think about that ourselves. I would be interested in visiting how we can do that.”

While an issue may only take 10 or 15 minutes of council meeting time, there’s additional staff time to document and prepare for the meeting. 

Police Chief Tim Lange told the Chronicle that he goes to most the meetings anyway, so he doesn’t mind.

“You got to get updated quotes and everything,” said Lange.

“And if they vote for the budget and it’s in there, it’d be nice to just let us spend it. Now, on the other side of it. I amended it by about three grand. Even the way they left it, I would be more comfortable going back to council and say, ‘Hey, I'm going to spend the money you gave me, but I need to spend a little bit more on this because things just change.’ And it’s not just the units, it’s not the vehicles in this case, it’s all the electronic equipment. Equipment and all that stuff. They call them MDCs, but they’re the computers that are in the units. It costs. 

“You can buy a computer today and in two years it's obsolete. So you estimate for what you're going to need and you set money aside for that, and then all of a sudden they come out and say, well, you need this with it now, too. Well, you didn't need that two years or a year ago. Well, now, if you want to keep using that now, you need this. And it happens all the time.”

“The budget is your plan for going forward for that year or five year or 10 year, but city manager, he's looking at the inflow of cash outflow of cash almost on a daily basis,” said counselor David Auge. “If things are getting really tight, although the department head has authority to buy, if you say, ‘Hey wait, I don't have the money right now,’ or ‘I might need this down the road.’ You have the ability to squash it.”