Final hearing and approval of the city budget happens at the Wednesday May 19th Assembly meeting. This is the last time citizens will be able to testify on the budget, the property tax mill rate, and capital improvement project plans. [The meeting was moved from Monday to Wednesday to accommodate those who plan to travel to Anchorage for Governor Hickel’s memorial service.]
Our last Finance committee meeting (of this cycle) was Wednesday May 12th. A number of groups and organizations had requested a total of $963,000 dollars from the $589,700 of increased tobacco tax revenue technically “available.” I say technically, because this is after we had previously decided to take a million a year out of our budget reserve to balance the budget. As you might imagine there was considerable discussion. We ended up deciding to spend an additional $112,700, and to put the remaining $477,000 back in the budget reserve.
The additional spending included:
Hospice and Home Care $50,000
NCADD Intervention Services (substance abuse) $19,600
Human Rights Commission $ 5,300
Council on Aging $ 2,800
JEDC Local match for a federal grant $35,000
Some wanted to spend more, others less, but I think this was a reasonably good outcome. It passed 6-2 with Mr. Wanamaker and Mr. Sanford opposing (Mr. Dybdahl was absent).
As I said, Wednesday 5/19 is the final hearing and anybody is welcome to testify on this tentative decision.
That $112,700 is small potatoes when looking at the entire city budget which is just under $300 million. It breaks down to about:
$89 million for Schools
$79 million for the Hospital
$63 million for general government services
$21 million for debt service
$19 million for capital projects
$14 million Water and Sewer and Waste Management
$5 million for the Airport
$4.5 million for Docks and Harbors
The revenue for all this comes from
40% user fees
26% state and federal grants
14% property tax
14% sales tax
6% miscellaneous
The property tax will be just slightly reduced from 10.6 mills to 10.51. That is a little over 1% -- or $1,051 tax for every $100,000 of assessed value.
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2 comments:
Nice clearly stated blog. I appreciate that you put down the numbers in a straightforward organized manner.
Also,I tend to forget that I can go down and speak to issues that concern me, rather than bitching about them when it's too late. Thanks for you blog,
NM
Amazing to me that 40% of revenue is from user fees and only 28% is from a combined property/sales tax.
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