Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard gets a big thumbs up from me this week. The Mayor managed to give his budget address the same day he was rushed to the hospital for possible heart trouble.

While I’m glad the Mayor is okay, I jokingly opined that trying to fix the budget mess left behind by the last administration was enough to give anyone cardiac arrest.

Let me show you a few examples.

The Mayor’s office budget went up more than $220,000. That was because the former administration would fund their employees with money from other departments so it looked like they were saving the taxpayers money.

Here’s another accounting trick. The people who used to run this place did a lot of inter-agency double billing. And when they stopped the practice, both agencies took credit for the budget cut. Those practices cost you millions of dollars.

And here’s a nice kicker, the former people in charge allocated funds that weren’t there to pay for projects and thought they could skate by and deal with them after the election. Apparently someone forgot about the voters.

So after cleaning up the former administration’s mess, the Ballard people closed a $26 million shortfall. Paid for public safety, economic development, roads and infrastructure, found cash to deal with abandoned housing and still has more than $4 million left over.

Be still my beating heart.