CITY BUDGET: Changes in spending tough to track

So you want to know how the Colorado Springs government spent your money over the past decade or so. How much was spent on public safety? How much on parks? Administration? Road repairs?

It sounds easy. But not so fast.

City officials routinely point to the government’s annual budgets and financial reports, posted on its Web page at www.springsgov.com, as evidence that all spending is open for anyone to examine. True, but the officials also acknowledge that changes from one year to the next make it tough to track even broad categories of spending.

Take the Information Technology department. The government’s spending on computers and people to support the technology was for years spread among dozens of agencies, and Information Technology itself was a relatively small department.

Then, in 2008, the government consolidated Information Technology into a central department. Its spending climbed dramatically, while the same money was removed from other department budgets. At the same time, the Information Technology department eliminated about a dozen positions from its staff of 81 workers, and the final effect on the 2009 budget was a 9.6 percent decline from a year earlier.

Examples abound, but a method to reconcile the changes is elusive. The City Engineering department lost two workers and their salaries totaling $161,844 in 2008 when those workers were transferred to IT. The same year, the Street Inspection Program was transferred from the Streets Division to City Engineering.

Further complications arise from the city’s many sources of revenue.

One of the biggest is the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, a separate government agency formed with voter approval in 2004 to levy a 1 percent sales tax for road building and improvement, and to support bus service.
The authority serves most of El Paso County, but more of its money goes to projects in Colorado Springs than anywhere else. In 2008, the authority provided $18.7 million worth of road maintenance in Colorado Springs and $26 million worth of road and bridge building projects. In addition, nearly all the $7.8 million the agency provided to support bus service benefited Colorado Springs residents.

Spending from the authority is acknowledged at various points in the city budget, but it is excluded from reports of the city’s general-fund spending, which is the most common measurement of how the city spends the public’s money.