By Ann Marie Shambaugh
After pumping the brakes on a request from the mayor to reallocate $200,000 from several city departments to help launch the Carmel Christkindlmarkt, the Carmel City Council unanimously voted to do just that at a special Aug. 29 meeting.
The source of the funding, however, changed a bit from the original plan. Instead of moving $100,000 from the Carmel Police Dept.’s gasoline fund – all of which was expected to be unused by the end of the year – the council reallocated $92,900 from the city council budget and $7,100 from the clerk treasurer’s budget.
“It all relates to public perception. There was perception that the dollars the mayor had earmarked from the police budget were vital to their operations. That’s not true; it was dollars that will not be used through the end of the year,” City Council President Sue Finkam said after the vote. “However I didn’t want people mistaking our transfer (of those) dollars as not supporting our police department.”
Other unused funds to be transferred for the market are $15,000 from the 2017 Carmel administration budget and $85,000 from the 2017 Street Dept. budget.
Finkam said that Mayor Jim Brainard had asked all department heads if they had any funds they weren’t going to use through the end of the year, as all unused funds go to the general fund. He did not, however, ask if the city council budget had unused funds.
The city council identified $5,000 earmarked for the paperless governance project, $10,000 for computer equipment, $47,813 for legal fees, $10,000 for consulting fees and $20,087 for deferred compensation as available to be used for the Christkindlmarkt instead.
The other $7,100 came from the clerk-treasurer’s budget. The money had been designated for an employee’s tuition reimbursement, but the employee decided not to return to school, Finkam said.
At the Aug. 21 meeting, the council decided in a split vote to not approve the $200,000 immediately. With the first meeting in September cancelled because of Labor Day, the council held the special meeting Aug. 29 to ensure that items to be ordered from overseas for the German-inspired holiday market will be received in time for its Nov. 18 opening.
“The market manager has done a really nice job identifying booths and vendors and items for sale, and she needs to get them ordered,” Finkam said. “If we waited any longer on this vote, we’d be putting the original $220,000 that the mayor had granted to this nonprofit (running the market) at risk, so it didn’t seem to make sense to put everything on hold to waste a couple hundred thousand dollars of grant money.”
