This is, barring some catastrophe, the last budget post.  Last night the Council worked our way through mark-up.  I got home at about 1:00am.  I’m very tired and crabby today.  The tax rate that the Council will propose is $1.472.  This consists of a General fund tax rate of $1.318 and a fire levy of .154.  The City Manager’s proposed rate was $1.489.  By way of comparison, last year’s tax rate was $1.493.  The $1.472 rate will generate an average flat residential tax bill.

The Council made some very difficult choices last night:  This budget eliminates a further 20 positions from the City budget and eliminates other functions that many in our City will miss.  Customer service will necessarily suffer somewhat.  The Fire & Rescue budet was balanced by taking $186,000 from the F&R fund balance and putting it into operating.  I don’t like that idea – you shouldn’t pay for operations out of fund balance but I was alone in my dissent: hey, you can’t always get what you want…:)

For my part, I’m not real happy with some of the more nitty-gritty decisions that were made but that isn’t any different than it has been for the past 2 years.  Overall I think the budget is about as good as it’s going to get but I do wonder how long we will be able to maintain this level of decline.  At some point, the Council is going to have to take a stab at stabilizing revenues or we’ll be forced to seriously consider how to rectify the established levels of citizen expectations with respect to services and service levels with a continually declining number of staff.  The two simply aren’t compatible.

Does all of that mean we need to raise the property tax rate next year?  Probably not on the general fund side.  I hope that over the next year most of this will take care of itself: the economy seems to be healing so sales and meals tax will probably get closer to normal levels.  However, we do have downside exposure to the state.  With unemployment unlikely to change much over the next year, the State will be in dire straites again so I’m sure the GA will make further cuts to local budgets (the state has little or no rainy day fund left) or pass expenses to localities in order to balance their budget. 

I need a nap.  That is all.

The Monday night meeting is over and the open items list didn’t change much.  The big item on the agenda tonight was the School budget presentation.  The school budget has been cut significantly and I think they did a pretty good job in a tough fiscal environment.

The other thing we did tonight was to establish a date by which the City will shut down the BPL internet system and it looks to be July 1st.  After we lost our last partner, the Council elected to give the Utilities department some time to see if they could make it work and, well, it just wasn’t working out….