Wellington Manager Predicts Fiscal Stability Ahead

Wellington’s year ahead should be fairly stable and predictable due to the economic recovery after several tumultuous years, even with the potential for significant changes on the Wellington Village Council, Village Manager Paul Schofield said.

“Next year is going to be an interesting year,” Schofield told the Town-Crier on Tuesday. “We were going to potentially have five new people on the council, but that’s not going to happen.”

Recently appointed Councilman John McGovern went unchallenged in his election bid, and either incumbent Mayor Bob Margolis or his challenger, Councilwoman Anne Gerwig, will be mayor.

Vice Mayor John Greene faces a challenge from attorney Michael Drahos, while attorney Michael Napoleone will take the seat being vacated in March by Councilman Matt Willhite. After the election, the new council will decide what to do regarding the seat that Gerwig is leaving in order to pursue her mayoral bid.

Schofield said that it is the first time in the village’s history that so many seats are up at one time.

“Other than that, next year is pretty straightforward for us,” he said. “Capital projects are about the same as they’ve always been.”

Several projects are more safety-related, including a roundabout at Stribling Way and Fairlane Farms Road, and paving 120th Avenue South from Lake Worth Road to 50th Street South.

“We’re investing money back into our water and sewer system, into the roads and drainage, and we’re looking forward to a year where we can concentrate on making good things better,” Schofield said.

Although the difficult fiscal years have passed, Wellington is still being cautious in its spending, he said.

“The last time the economy was really good and things were growing at very fast rates, governments weren’t as careful about letting tax rates rise,” he said. “We stayed at the 2.4 [mill] range. We dropped it a little bit here and there, but [other] governments let their collections go up in projects and everything expanded. We’re not going to do that. The economy is good, and quite frankly, we expect it to stay that way for a while.”

While Schofield’s prediction is based on historic patterns, he does not want the village to again have to make drastic cuts in order to remain solvent.

“We’re going to be much more careful than in the past because I don’t ever want to be in the position where we’re going to have to make significant cuts again,” he said. “Most of the debt is gone, and the council is able to look at things.”

Last year, the council considered purchases of the Binks Forest Golf Course and unused land at the Wanderers Club, but decided not to take action on that at the time. It also considered selling the K-Park land on State Road 7, opting to keep it for now.

Improvements for 2016 will be based on what the village learned from the past, including lessons from Tropical Storm Isaac, such as raising Forest Hill and South Shore boulevards and making culvert improvements, which will all be done without having to borrow money.

“There is no pressure to, say, sell K-Park, because we are able to take a look within our means,” he said. “I expect it to stay there, and we are really able to start thinking about how do we want to move forward in the next 10 or 15 years and set up long-term planning for that.”

Schofield said that the council has been good about conducting visioning sessions in recent years.

“They’re interested in staying with those, so we’re going to be looking at things,” he said. “We’re doing a lot of work in the neighborhoods, and we’re going to continue to see that. You’re going to see us concentrating on the neighborhoods that need it. You’re going to see us getting back into more about how we can help our schools. The next thing we’re really going to concentrate on is what do we do for that age group of kids in their late teens to early 20s where they’re having to leave Wellington. How do we deal with that? Those are the kinds of quality-of-life questions that we want to look at over the next couple of years.”

The council is also looking carefully at its fund balances to see that they remain healthy moving forward, and making wise investments that will bring a good return to the taxpayers.

“The Lake Wellington Professional Centre turned out to be a really good investment,” Schofield said. “We’re putting money into the general fund from it, and we’re getting reserves. It’s paying for itself.”

He cites the new Wellington Tennis Center as another example of wise investing that will bring a return to the village.

Schofield sees his job as giving the council recommendations in order to enable the elected officials to make wise decisions, he said.

“Too many times [in] local government, the manager is going to sit there and say, ‘Things are good this year; I’ll worry about it next year,’” he said. “I don’t ever want my council to be in the position that other municipalities find themselves in that, ‘Oh, we’ve been spending money, and we’ve been going into reserves.’ Meanwhile, I’m not telling you, so you don’t know what you have to do to adjust it, or we stop doing capital projects, so that now instead of a $10 million utility repair, it is now $25 million and we don’t have the money.”

Local governments are constrained by state-imposed tax caps that tie growth to the rate of per-capita personal income growth, Schofield explained.

“If we don’t change the way we do things, inflation will make the cost of government higher than our revenue,” he said. “Inflation will increase faster than revenue, so that’s why we tell them that. Yes, it is a warning: If we don’t look at what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, we will be out of money in five years or six years.”

Although automatic utility rate increases are an available option, due to good fiscal management, the council has not had to impose them in the past several years.

“We’ve looked at how we deliver the capital projects there, and we’ve been able to stay under budget in terms of expenditures,” Schofield said. “We’ve done technology and process improvements so that we haven’t had to do rate increases.”

Similar long-term planning is in place for road maintenance and improvement, which is a major cost for the village, he said.

Investing in technology is another way that the village has been able to control expenses, which he said was a council-driven initiative.

“We have a much greater presence in social media,” he said. “If you want to know what’s going on in our parks system, somebody is tweeting about that or putting it on Facebook.”

The village has also revamped its web site to be more interactive, including the online Budget Challenge.

“We’re doing that outreach more, and more than that, we’re getting out and seeing people more,” Schofield said. “We want people to be involved. We’re doing a lot more community surveys now. We beg people to take the Budget Challenge every year because it’s the chance you get to tell us [about] how we’re spending money.”