20 hours of City meetings total this week.  I am crabby and tired.  The tax rate that the Council will present to the citizens at our next meeting will be $1.35.  The city manager’s budget, which was a wonder of balance and priority, used a tax rate of $1.37 and cut a lot of money and positions from the budget.  We cut some more last night.  We also used a very small amount ($200k) of fund balance.  We have more than $13 million in the fund balance (rainy day fund).

The proposed fire levy will also go down a cent.  The 3rd fire station has been put on hold until our Fire and Rescue department can complete their plans.  I think the station is a reasonable idea but we need to make sure we understand what we’re getting into.  We’ll get there and probably sooner than later.

I’ll post the category by category summary later but average taxes should go down $40/month. 

More later.

There is a work session tonight on some technology upgrades for community development.  Wednesday there is a joint work session over at Utilities at 6:00 with the schools.  The big tamale – Budget Mark Up is following the school session at 7:00.  Mark-Up is where the Council makes its own adjustments to the budget and finalizes it. 

To date, we’ve had 3 otherwise uninvolved citizens attend a work session and 2 people speak during citizens time about the budget.  On a positive note, we have had good numbers of folks show up for the public safety work sesssions.