On Monday Salem city councilors voted unanimously to set up a new committee that will take a deeper dive into the city’s budget to identify savings. The committee, which was suggested by the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce and the Home Builders Association of Marion & Polk Counties will include members of the public with knowledge and professional experience working with multimillion dollar budgets.  Chamber, home builders association call for new committee to focus on city budget  The group will be tasked with combing through the city’s budget to ensure it is operating at maximum efficiency. City Manager Keith Stahley and chamber director Tom Hoffert are currently in discussions about what the committee will look like, Stahley said during the meeting.  City councilors said they hoped the committee’s work, which is expected to only take a matter of six weeks, will help build community trust as the council considers asking Salem voters in May to accept a property tax increase to help pay for city services.  Without the extra revenue, the city will inevitably have to make deep cuts to the city’s budget to balance a nearly $14 million budget deficit which could result in a reduction of firefighter and police and the closure of the city’s library. Last week the city announced that a forecast review team convened by Stahely in November took another look at the city’s budgetary deficit lowering its forecast by $4 million.  New forecast shows smaller Salem budget deficit, but deep cuts still likely The city’s budget committee will meet Wednesday night to discuss the financial forecast, and the draft budget will be released in the spring.  The meeting on Monday night was the first council meeting presided over by now Mayor Julie Hoy, and came following a festive and well-attended swearing in ceremony for her and three new city councilors: Irvin Brown, Shane Matthews, and Paul Tigan.   City Councilor Micki Varney put forward the proposal for the budget efficiencies group, but on the condition that the chamber be billed for any associated costs given the city’s budgetary constraints. The council ultimately unanimously adopted an alternate proposal from Matthews that doesn’t require the chamber to pay, but caps at 60 hours the amount of city employee time that can be dedicated to supporting the new group. Varney said she brought up the billing topic to create dialogue on the matter and to make the point that by doing so, the city would be acting like a business as opposed to a public agency serving the public. Varney told Salem Reporter she also was hoping that the public would have access to the group’s meetings, something that might not have been the case if the committee was convinced by the city manager without council authorization. “I am very appreciative that the chamber and the (home builders) association are committed to working with the city of Salem to maintain, to ensure funding, for our essential services,” Varney said during the meeting. “I was thinking, OK, if we are supposed to be operating efficiently and operating as a business, I was thinking that the business model would need to charge billable hours for a service that we were providing to a private entity, or entities.”  Matthew’s motion called for the new committee (membership proposal) to be drafted by the city manager, and approved by the city finance committee, which includes City Councilors Vanessa Nordyke, Deanna Gwyn, and Varney. The group would be allotted no more than the 60 hours of city staff support time to complete its examination of the budget and to report back unless more time is authorized by council.  “I have some concerns with doing the funding aspect on the back side where the chamber or the home builders have to pay for that, partially because I’m concerned that it creates a divisiveness within, ‘if you can pay for it, then the city will do it,’” Matthews said. “That is not necessarily where we want to be. We don’t want to be in a situation where if an organization or an individual can pay for us to look into something, we’ll look into it. We just want to look into it because it is the right thing to look into.”  Brown, the former chair of the city’s budget committee, questioned whether the new committee would play into the city’s ultimate goal of gaining community trust.   “Are we thinking that this particular committee, this group, is going to help us win back the trust of our voters?” Brown said. ”Is this going to be one of the tools we are going to use?”  Brown said the city should be prepared for the possibility that such an examination might not yield the desired results or change the voters’ perspective. Councilors differed on whether or not a budget efficiencies committee would be useful to the city’s objectives or provide anything the budget committee isn’t already providing.  Tigan said he felt like creating the new committee takes away some of the “legislative prerogative” of the budget committee, while Nordyke said the new committee would provide a deeper perspective the budget committee has not considered.  “The city budget committee does not do a deep dive into efficiencies. It never has,” Nordyke said. “Now, members of the budget committee have advocated for hiring, creating an independent auditor’s office to do just that.”  Council President Linda Nishioka said while at first she was frustrated by the call for the new committee, seeing it as an unnecessary enterprise that signals a lack of trust in the city, she now sees it as an opportunity to build more trust with the community.  During the conversation about what purpose such a committee would serve, Hoy said the primary purpose is bringing the community to the table.  “When it comes time to making an ask for something, because some form of the deficit is real, we need to know what we are asking for and have the people beside us, the community beside us and understanding that we’ve done our due diligence,” Hoy said. “That is the benefit I see to that group.” Contact reporter Joe Siess: [email protected] or 503-335-7790.A MOMENT MORE, PLEASE – If you found this story useful, consider subscribing to Salem Reporter if you don’t already. 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