May 4, 2019

Mallory Herrmann
citydesk@lstribune.net

The city council’s finance and budget committee has wrapped a two-session series of departmental overviews as they delve into the city’s budget for fiscal year 2020. After hearing brief presentations from each of the city’s major departments, they will meet again this month to discuss a long list of expansion requests.

“Every department wants to do better – it wants to serve more – and we actually have more people, more population,” said Steve Arbo, city manager said of those requests.

While the budget as presented by Arbo balances the city’s projected revenues to current services and programming costs, there are some one-time costs that the city is expecting that will total about $1.7 million in excess of that budget. Arbo said staff will be working to find additional funds, either unallocated or unspent, that could be used to offset those costs. But that’s before they consider any of the expansion requests, which total approximately $3 million.

The committee will meet next on May 20. The budget will come to the full city council for a public hearing on Jun. 4, with a second reading to approve the budget slated for Jun. 18.