In the face of a national economic recession, the Ames City Council swam against the stream of current trends and announced a decrease in property taxes for next year’s city budget.

Last Tuesday, the Council approved the 2003-2004 fiscal year budget, with the property tax decrease. The budget, totaling more than $115 million — roughly equal to the combined total of all ISU tuition — maintains all city services while decreasing the property tax by one cent per $1,000.

City Manager Steve Schainker said the purpose of maintaining property taxes was to help Ames citizens troubled by the economic recession. However, he said the recession has also made the task of compensating for lost property taxes difficult.

“With the cost of insurance, gasoline and employee salaries going up, the task wasn’t easy,” Schainker said.

In order to compensate for rising expenses, he said he challenged city department heads to examine their budgets and look for places to make cuts that would not affect their service to citizens. “Overall I was very pleased with their efforts,” he said.

The budget cuts won’t affect city services in the near future, but could cause harm in the long term, said several department heads.

Paul Gierasch, director of human resources, said he normally sends his staff to training and development conferences in other states. He said they are essential because they keep the staff up-to-date on current laws.

Due to budget cuts, Gierasch said the human resources staff will not be able to attend those meetings.

“In the short-term, not attending those conferences won’t hurt our staff, but this can’t continue for the long-term because we need to keep current with new human resource laws,” he said. “It’s like changing the oil in your car — skipping one oil change won’t affect it’s performance, but if the oil is never changed it will permanently damage the car.”

The Ames Fire Department said it has had to make similar sacrifices.

Deputy Fire Chief Paul Sandoval said all out-of-state training for the force has been temporarily eliminated.

“Typically we go to the Firefighters Instructors Conference in Indianapolis,” he said. “This conference keeps us informed on the latest techniques in fire-fighting. Now only one or two of us can go there, due to the budget cuts.”

Sandoval agreed with Gierasch that short-term sacrifices could be made to help the city. However, he also said a long-term sacrifice could hurt the quality of the fire department.