The Honolulu City Council Budget Committee will consider a bill that aims to bring more transparency to the city’s budget Tuesday.
The measure would require the Department of Budget and Fiscal Services to provide information on the amount of money the city could see lapse when it submits its budget request. It’s in response to concerns over unused funds that were allocated to departments.
The department would need to provide projections on the amount of funds they think departments will lapse.
Councilmember Tommy Waters introduced the measure and says that last year the city lapsed about $785 million and carried over $452 million for a total of $1.2 billion in unspent funds.
Waters pointed to the Honolulu Police Department’s patrol division, which lapsed about $15 million last year. During the last Budget Committee discussion about the measure, he used it as an example and said those funds could have been spent on other things for the department, like new cars or bulletproof vests.
However, Budget and Fiscal Services Director Andy Kawano opposed the measure. He explained that when the budget is being created in January, there are still five months left in the fiscal year, so the projections could be inaccurate.
“Those numbers that would be provided to you, chair, with the approximate lapse amount would be based on data, again sometime between Jan. 15 and the end of the year. We don’t know what’s going to happen the rest of the year. There could be a tsunami, a lot of overtime use,” he said during the October Budget Committee meeting.
“We can chew through that excess cash pretty quick. We want to be safe and we’re going to expend overtime based on what is prudent and necessary to protect the public.”
In a written statement, Waters explained that measures like Bill 64 are meant to increase transparency over the city’s budget.
“Our goal is simple: to move from reactive budgeting to proactive management,” he wrote. “These bills create consistent definitions and regular uniform reporting to ensure that this crucially important financial data is both accessible and actionable.”
If the bill passes out of the Budget Committee on Tuesday, it will next have a final vote by the full council.
