The Mansfield Parks & Recreation Department (MP&Rhave a serious problem when talking about budgeting and planning. There's a napkin sketch algebra to determining what you're spending and how much you have to spend.
I've found it nearly impossible to untangle the cluster-muck of numbers and membership categories used in managing the Mansfield Community Center (MCC).And it's not only that mess. To top it off the MP&R spending seems to be coupled to the MCC in weird and not so wonderful ways. There will be a bit of redundancy that follows, but...
41. The MCC's budget needs to be autonomous from the rest of the MP&R budget. The scope of the MCC budget must be constrained to the services offered in that building. Keep it simple. That's what membership pays for.
42. The MCC building is part of the MP&R budget. Mansfield owns the building and makes it available as a public good (that's what "community" means). Membership is not responsible for all the public goods Mansfield owns and maintains (parks, monuments, and so on).
43. If Mansfield uses Public Works to move dirt around then sweeping the MCC floors is just another aspect of that job description and budget.
44. A senior citizen MCC membership category is unique to Senior Citizens and a nationally recognized metric for membership reimbursement is established and sensible. It's not based on local spending habits, it's based on calculated usage based on well known age limitations and a healthy cadence of attendance.
Senior citizens using insurance aren't the same as "Individual" memberships. They can't take advantage of family aggregate discounts. Their ability to use equipment is limited. There are innumerable reasons why the insurance rate is a sane and reasonable reimbursement.
To encourage the insurance industry to raise this reimbursement rate is the equivalent of asking for across the board increases in health insurance rates, it does nothing to reduce local taxes, and it simply promotes a pattern of inevitable cost inflation. Dumb and dumber.
45. It is not impossible to predict anticipated yearly income and therefore plan expenditures that stay within that constraint. A quick and dirty calculation might be:
It's not unreasonable to plug in last year's actual income as a baseline for the next year. And if you are overspending on the right side of the equation, the solution is to reduce spending.
46. REDUCE SPENDING
47. Use a tool like Trello to visualize a Kanban board of tasks. Trello tools have rows (swim lanes of progress) and columns representing stages of completion and cost).
48. An important swim lane is emergency tasks that require the highest priority attention. This last year, swimming pool repair and air conditioning repair are exactly those kinds of things.
49.The leftmost column is a wish list and must list of costed tasks to be prioritized WITHOUT EXCEEDING THE ANTICIPATED BUDGET.
50. Plan not to exceed the anticipated budget and no membership fee adjustments are needed.
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