{"id":15246,"date":"2012-09-11T10:51:10","date_gmt":"2012-09-11T17:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spiken.wpengine.com\/news\/kent-city-council-approves-consulting-contract-to-find-ways-to-cut-costs\/"},"modified":"2016-10-22T12:00:46","modified_gmt":"2016-10-22T19:00:46","slug":"kent-city-council-approves-consulting-contract-to-find-ways-to-cut-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/news\/kent-city-council-approves-consulting-contract-to-find-ways-to-cut-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Kent City Council approves consulting contract to find ways to cut costs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><p>The Kent City Council approved a $43,730 contract with a consultant to find ways to save money in the city budget.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p>The council authorized the contract Sept. 4 with BERK consulting of Seattle. BERK expects to brief the council the week of Oct. 29 about its findings and is scheduled to issue a final report the week of Nov. 26, according to city Operations Committee documents.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p>Council members asked Mayor Suzette Cooke and her administration to find a consultant to study the city budget and operations in an effort to find further efficiencies to reduce the budget by as much as $2 million per year.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p><a title=\"council\" href=\"http:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/news\/164625586.html\" target=\"_self\">The council approved that study at a July 31 meeting<\/a> when it also approved sending a property tax levy increase measure to voters Nov. 6 to help pay for city park and street repairs.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p>As part of the study, the consultant plans to:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p>1. Assess the current cost and level-of-service situation at the city.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p>2. Analyze peer and neighbor jurisdictions to see how the city compares on a range of cost and revenue metrics.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p>3. Identify possible opportunities to streamline the city\u2019s cost structure.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p>4. Conduct an initial, high level assessment of impacts and tradeoffs implied by the options identified in step 3.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Kent City Council approved a $43,730 contract with a consultant to find ways to save money in the city budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-15246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15246"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=15246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}