• City Retains Aa3 Moody Rating, and the negative outlook designation given with the 2005 issuance has been removed. The Aa3 is considered a very good rating, and as of September 2006 only 35 Ohio municipalities out of 177 rank higher than the City of Lakewood.
• According to Moody’s, “after three successive years (2002 to 2004) of sizable operating shortfalls due to softening of the city’s primary revenues (namely, income taxes), the city reduced its workforce through attrition and achieved other operating efficiencies so as to restore structural balance, leading to modest surpluses in fiscal 2005 and fiscal 2006 (unaudited).”
• The City of Lakewood has been awarded the Government Finance Officers Association Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for 2006. Lakewood is among a select few Ohio cities that has achieved this honor. In addition, our latest city audit completed by the State Auditor over an extensive four month period, also gave the City of Lakewood an “Unqualified” clean audit finding.
• Faced with rising fuel and health care costs, we have aggressively pursued cost-cutting measures to help us maintain financial stability for the city.
• During my time in office, we have eliminated reduced the number of employees by 30
• We negotiated a zero percent pay increase for city workers in 2004
• For the first time in city history, in 2004 we implemented employee contributions to health care costs
• We installed time clocks for city workers in 2004, enabling us to track attendance and tardiness
• Elimination of employee perks like city-paid distilled water and coffee service
• I have even taken cost cutting to a personal level, vetoing a proposed $30,000 pay increase for mayor in 2006. (Ironically, both of my opponents in this campaign favored the mayoral pay increase, even as they campaign under the guise of “fiscal responsibility”.)
• We have instituted the nationally renown CitiStat program to help us improve efficiency in the future.
• We have exited the costly RITA tax collection system. Costs for RITA’s collections doubled from $250,000 in the year 2000 to over $528,000 in 2004. We began collecting our own taxes in house in 2006, resulting both in lower costs and increased revenue.
