Reno's Budget Crisis: Too Broke for Neighborhood Meetings, But Mayor Schieve is Lathering on the Sunscreen in Tampa.
When your city is drowning in a $25 million deficit, every dollar counts—except, apparently, when it comes to conference travel.
Mayor Hillary Schieve jetted off to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Tampa, Florida, leaving Renoites to wonder about the city's spending priorities. While residents have been told the budget crisis is so severe that neighborhood advisory board meetings—those pesky forums where actual citizens get to voice concerns—had to be axed to save on employee time costs, somehow there was still room in the budget for a Florida excursion.
Let's do the math here: Too broke to pay city staff to listen to residents in their own backyard, but flush enough to send the mayor to sunny Tampa for a conference. That's some creative accounting.
Suppose to be a sunny 91° in Tampa Florida today … hopefully Mayor Schieve is handing out free samples of Spooge to keep her fellow mayors protected from the sun.
What exactly did this Tampa trip accomplish for cash-strapped Reno? Is it essential city business, or just another networking opportunity? And speaking of networking—with Tampa's abundant sunshine and captive audience of mayors, was this perhaps the perfect venue to pitch Mayor Schieve's sunscreen venture, Spooge? After all, what better place to market sun protection products than Florida, and what better customer base than fellow mayors who spend plenty of time at outdoor ribbon cuttings and street festivals pressing the flesh?
The optics are, shall we say, less than ideal, but Schieve doesn’t care - she’s termed-out. Residents can't get a seat at the table for neighborhood meetings because of budget constraints, but the mayor can get a seat on a plane to Florida.
Here's what Reno taxpayers deserve to know:
What was the total cost of this Tampa trip?
What specific benefits did it deliver to a city that's supposedly so financially strapped it can't afford basic citizen engagement?
And perhaps most importantly—if we're cutting community meetings to save pennies, shouldn't we also be scrutinizing conference travel that costs considerably more?
Good governance means making tough choices consistently, not just when it affects regular citizens. If Reno is truly in crisis mode, then every expense—from neighborhood meetings to mayoral conferences—should face the same scrutiny.
Unless, of course, there's a business case to be made for sunscreen sales. In which case, transparency would be nice. Hopefully we’ll learn Schieve paid her own way to the conference.