The Emperor is Naked

The City of Massillon is going through its Annual Summer Financial Crisis. The city is facing a one million dollar budget shortfall, as stated by Auditor Jayne Ferrero in June.

www.massillonreview.blogspot.com/2010/06/surprise.html

This was predicted by the Massillon Review in May.

www.massillonreview.blogspot.com/2010/05/summertime.html

We shouldn't pat ourselves on the back for this prediction, because the city has a financial crisis every year, and it is proclaimed in the summer, hence the name Annual Summer Financial Crisis. Happens every summer. It's like the Pro Football Hall of Fame Festival, it is an annual event.

Our Mayor for Life recently proclaimed a spending freeze throughout his kingdom. Money can only be spent for emergencies like hotel mortgages, grant writers, and summer concerts. One of the peasants must have shared our Mayor's decree to the local paper, who chose to write a story about the spending freeze. Our Mayor for Life's response was to downplay the freeze.

Thud

The sound you just heard was our Mayor for Life throwing Auditor Jayne Ferrero under the bus... again.

"He said the move is not a reflection of the city's fiscal state and he dismissed Ferrero's projected shortfall" (The Independent, August 11, 2010).

He sure throws Auditor Ferrero under the bus a lot. As a loyal foot soldier in General Cicchinelli's army, she dutifully gets back up, dusts herself off, and goes back for more. Her blind loyalty is indeed remarkable.

So is the city short a million dollars? Is Ferrero lying? Or is our Mayor relying on the "hope and pray" method of financing the city's shortfall?

Our suspicion is that the city really is a million dollars short for 2010 with a little over four months left to find the money.

Our Mayor for Life, who is heading into an election for his seventh four year term as mayor for life, must downplay the budget deficit. Otherwise it might look like our city's finances are mismanaged, and the peasantry may decide to depose their king, and select a new mayor.

"Those numbers in the big picture are really insignificant to me because all those numbers are based on estimated revenue and estimated expenses" (Frank Cicchinelli, The Independent, August 11, 2010).

According to our crack Massillon Review Financial Team, this is how government budgeting works. Cities estimate revenue and expenses. Our guess is that with about eight months of the year gone, the estimates are pretty accurate. The city is about one million dollars short. The Emperor clearly has no clothes.

We realize that our Mayor for Life is working hard to utilize every trick he has learned in his 37 years in city government to mask this shortfall through internal borrowing, deferring pension payments, selling city assets (parks), robbing Peter to pay Paul, or whatever financial slight of hand he can summons up to keep the ship afloat through his next election. Based on past experience, we believe he will pull it off for one more year. Mayor Cicchinelli is like Enron's management team, he is clearly the smartest guy in the room. However, when this financial house of cards he has constructed finally does collapse, and it will, the results will be ruinous.

So now we have a spending freeze that isn't really a spending freeze, but just kind of freezes spending. And the city is a million dollars short this year, but those are just numbers, and numbers don't always add up. We are sold. Problem solved. Don't worry, be happy!

By the way, might someone please tell city council that the city is broke, and they may wish to cancel the rest of their Summer Vacation and actually look at the city's budget.