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Laguna Beach studies delegating routine budget transfers to city manager; residents urge caution
Summary
City finance staff proposed removing dated language from Laguna Beachmunicipal code and adopting a policy to let the city manager make intra-fund transfers while preserving council approval when total appropriations change; residents and some council members urged retaining oversight and more frequent reporting.
Laguna Beach City Council held a study session to review proposed changes to municipal code chapter 3.24 and a draft council policy that would let the city manager make routine budget transfers within the same fund while reserving council action for changes that increase total appropriations. Michelle Banigan, the city's director of finance, led the presentation and said the code has "not been updated since the eighties," arguing some dated provisions — including a fixed May 1 deadline for providing the proposed budget and a hard-coded $400,000 reserve figure — should be modernized.
Banigan said staff wants to remove specific calendar dates from the code to allow practical flexibility in meeting the budget schedule and to avoid hard-coded dollar amounts that become obsolete as the budget grows. "So the red line changes were to change that dollar amount. We're not gonna change the…
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