Good budget trend, and good idea

Just a couple of stress-inducing budgets past what the mayor said was a historically bad year, the vectors in the fiscal 2017 Columbus Consolidated Government budget are definitely pointing in a more encouraging direction, namely upward.

Columbus Council on Tuesday gave unanimous approval to an FY 2017 budget of slightly more than $270 million, a figure significant this year mostly for the fact that for the first time in more than 10 years, balancing the budget doesn’t involve the city depending on reserve funds. (That whole idea is kind of an oxymoron anyway, at least conceptually if not technically: Is a budget really “balanced” if it requires, in effect, borrowing money to balance it?)

Happily, this year the question is moot. Mayor Teresa Tomlinson said the city seems to have “turned a corner,” and certainly the fact that the city stays above the 60-day threshold of reserve funds — thus maintaining a sound bond rating — is cause for reasonable optimism that she’s right.

The mayor called FY2015 “really the worst year that we’ve had,” with the city coming perilously close to the necessity of cutting back services and putting some city employees at least temporarily out of work.

Councilor and Budget Review Committee chair Skip Henderson offered what seems a sound approach to budget control — having the council meet quarterly as the Budget Review Committee so the whole process of fiscal analysis isn’t all squeezed into the budgeting block of the city calendar. The current process, Henderson said, “makes it hard to really drill down and feel like you’ve been able to examine everything.”

Even if such sessions can’t, as Tomlinson rightly noted, result in much actual policy before the budgeting session officially begins, knowing what to expect would definitely help.

Quiet solace

The Chick-fil-A restaurant chain is not a faith-based organization; it’s a for-profit corporation. But its founding family is known for strong religious convictions, which not so long ago were the subject of a blessedly brief “controversy” drummed up by some clumsy ambush reporting that made people on both sides of a culture war battle line look profoundly silly.

Aside from such nonsense, the most familiar manifestation of the company leadership’s religious orientation is that it’s closed on Sundays. But not last Sunday, and not in Orlando.

Several Chick-fil-A stores were open in and around that terror- and tragedy-stunned Florida city, with employees preparing food for people who needed it — and for others willing to help as well.

People around Orlando reportedly were waiting hours in long lines in the blistering heat to give blood for surviving victims of the nightclub attack; while they waited, Chick-fil-A employees served them sandwiches and iced tea. They also served many of the law enforcement responders to the shooting.

Culture warriors could go pick their fights somewhere else. This was about people at their best doing what they could to help victims of humanity at its worst.

This story was originally published June 15, 2016 at 6:11 PM with the headline "Good budget trend, and good idea."