Viewers Flood The News On 6 With City Budget Questions

By Emory Bryan, The News On 6

TULSA, OK – The News On 6 has been getting a lot of e-mails with questions about the Tulsa City Budget.

We will start at city hall where those lights inside make people angry the city is wasting money on electricity.

We asked about that and found out the city has to leave some of the lights on for emergency exits, mainly, because people are in the building around the clock.

While it appears all the lights are on - actually - most of the interior lights are off after hours.

That's just one question we frequently hear.

A lot of people are upset about the cutbacks, especially to public safety, so the simplest question about the budget is - what happened?

The answer is too much spending or not enough sales tax coming in.

Several viewers asked why the city doesn't do something to make more money.

The mayor says he wants to but says that can't happen fast enough to solve the problem.

Mayor Dewey Bartlett said, "What are we going to do to increase revenue coming in to this city's government? We have a variety of ways doing that in my opinion, but so far, we have spent, probably 95% of our time, the mayor's office, the finance department, trying to deal with this terrible shortfall."

One city councilor suggested police officers write more traffic tickets, but the police chief says he won't ask officers to do that.

We often hear questions about why the city doesn't cut other employees; from the parks, and street departments, anywhere but public safety.

The city is cutting other places. Of the current cuts, fire and police will be cut back by about $6 million dollars. Other city employees and services will be cut by $4.4 million.

And we frequently are asked why Mayor Bartlett is not taking a pay cut, or why he takes a salary at all.

Bartlett promised employees Wednesday he would take an 8.6% salary cut; that would cost him $9,300 a year.

"I as mayor and my departments, we are all participating in the pay cuts," Bartlett said.

So how far off is the budget?

It's off by about $2 million a month right now.

That is why the city has to somehow make up $10 million for the next five months before the next budget year and all this starts all over again.