Quincy Quarry News Weekly Fish Wrap: Budget, what budget? #mayorkoch #cityofquincyma #cityofquincy

Quincy Quarry News Weekly Fish Wrap: Budget, what budget?

– News about Quincy Massachusetts from Quincy Quarry News with commentary added

Someone has some explaining to do<br/.a Quincy Quarry News file photo

Quincy Quarry News Weekly Fish Wrap: Budget, what budget?

While Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch foisted an audio and image-based overview of his proposed Fiscal Year 2023 so-called budget, the budget itself was pretty much of a joch.

For starters, the actual budget document did not provide all that much of a basis to review this year’s planned koched-up spending with past years’ spending.

So what, apparently, if providing such data is SOP with budget planning.

For example, both many past Koch budgets and the current one do not include headcount data and which is clearly important information. 

[Is that chad hanging – or not?
A 2000 election Free Republic image

Then again, God forbid that the taxpayers paying the salaries see how koched-up is the city’s payroll with hack hires.

So what if such is also standard information to be found in a proper budget.

Also troubling, actual amounts spent on what in years past are also not noted. 

Further, merely but minimally detailed breakouts of various areas of proposed spendings are yet again not provided.

For example, annual operating sorts of spending in the special Quincy Center redevelopment district is lumped into Koch’s highly consolidated budget and thus impossible to review.

Utterly impossible to readily review.

In other words, Koch’s budgets thus provide next to all but meaningless numbers.

Details, schmetails – trust me.
…A still image from a YouTube image

Then again, the Koch Maladministration has also long blown off the City Council’s request for an accounting of the roughly $150 million in debt-financed funds spent over roughly the past decade.

Speaking of bond debt, Koch’s budgets provide very, very, very little actually useful as well as proper information on the now over one billion dollars of outstanding city debt.

A total that almost doubled in December of last year.

Follow the money. ALWAYS follow the money
Image via oxycom.com

For example, the prefacing narrative for the budget does not include $475 million in pension obligation bond debt in the bond debt PowerPoint charts and such.

And for yet another outrage, the Koch Maladministration’s budgets provided to the public are based on an old spreadsheet template that must be manually updated.

In turn, such in turn all but invariably results in errata such as transposed numbers and other such manual data entry errors.

In other words: garbage in, garbage out.

Garbage in, garbage out
A QQ Citizen PhotoJournalist photo

So what for the fact that the City of Quincy’s accounting software can readily as well as accurately compile the data and then produce a proper budget document via pre-formatted budget report generating options via but a few keystrokes as compared to the current time-consuming manual updating of data into what is instead a woefully inexcusable so-called budget.

Then again, surely such an all but useless budget is not purposely foisted upon local taxpayers.

In any event, Koch is proposing to increase city spending by almost 8% from last year and, per only reasonable assumptions, a similar increase in taxes.

A heel …
A file photo

Even so, in a piece of gobsmacking kayfabe, if not also doublespeak, Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch claimed that his proposed Fiscal Year 2023 budget was level-funded as compared to last’s year’s budget except where costs are increasing.

In short, yet again only in the Q …

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