Travis County Commissioners Court
September 6, 2005
Item 34
Now, do we need to take up 34, the rules today?
>> yes.
>> do we need to?
>> no.
>> you want to hit the highlights for us? I think we ought to take another week and read them. The holiday didn't help any yesterday, mr. Miller. 34, consider and take appropriate action on proposed f.y. '06 budget rules. Maybe a brief overview would be appropriate.
>> judge, I’ll be extremely brief. The budget rules are relatively unchanged from this year compared to last year. There's only a couple of points I’d like to mention is that the budget adjustment process will go back to the process that it was prior to f.y. 2005 for automatic budget adjustments. There was a law passed that allowed the Commissioners court to dell great authority as was done before the attorney general's ruling. So we'll be going back to that process or at least we're proposing we go back to that process. The auditor's office streamlined the travel section for greater readability. We clarified in a variety of areas, and I can run through them, what is essentially existing policy. We just put tonight clearer terms in the budget rules. And we added four more line items so that we believe -- that we believe are consistent with how the court has acted in the past that we thought you would like to see before departments transfer automatically out of them. Sheriff's medical services line item, sheriff's out of county inmate housing, leases and performance based pay with the exception of performance based pay to implement the department's performance based policy is included so it would be an automatic adjustment. Those are the major differences. We've submitted the budget rules and legislative format for you to read the specific differences. I can tell you that in my opinion the changes are very minor compared to almost any other year.
>> I just notice you have a thing there and it just came up on starflight, interpret business travel, that we did have things related to the helicopter that required that. I’m also wondering because we did have this thing come up as well, I think there's still some issues related to the difference between the 48 continental united states versus the other two. About whether that is something also that needs to have Commissioners court prior approval. I think some people might consider hawaii and alaska to be in the same category of getting outside of our borders.
>> I can imagine the auditor's office will have no problem with that recommendation.
>> because the question is being raised on one, that department chose not to allow someone to do a particular one because it doesn't look right.
>> I can amend the budget rules to incorporate that. The only other clarification is we did include -- we didn't include the pops pay scale, but we did include the regular pay scale in the addendum area. It's just an addendum so we would substitute whatever pay scale is approved by Commissionerss court.
>> okay. We'll have it back on next week. Please review this and if you have questions or comments, we'll take those. Otherwise, mr. Miller expects us to take objection this item.
>> just as a quick note -rblgs we did send it to all elected officials for comments and we haven't gotten any comments back at this point.
>> that means they are all in agreement. Good work.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, September 7, 2005 10:24 AM