City Budget

How Our City Budget Works:
Mayor David J. Faber and City Manager John Mauro
 

December 4, 2024

Budgets are built every year. While they encapsulate and give effect to literally everything the City does, they also may come off as monotonous and dull. In many communities, the budget is a myopic and somewhat stale approach to the year ahead, often a hold-over to “this is always how we’ve done it.” 

Not so with this budget, and here’s why: underpinning this budget is a few years’ worth of award-winning work to look ahead more than a decade in securing the City’s financial sustainability. Over those years, we took a holistic and integrated look of City services, our natural environment, our physical infrastructure, and our ability as a community to afford and maintain our quality of life. We asked residents what they care about and what level of service they’d be willing to pay for. We created videos, appointed a task force, and drafted a report which became our blueprint for action. 

The premise was grounded in the drift toward a “fiscal cliff” – not a hard line at which point the City would run out of funding, since we have to balance the budget every year – but a conceptual one which would force us to ramp down service delivery to keep within real financial limits. Basically, letting things go like core infrastructure without a plan for maintenance or replacement puts us on the reactive back foot and creates huge liabilities that eventually come back to bite us with sharp fiscal consequences. Instead, planning ahead for what level of service our community wants and proactively putting a financial plan in place to achieve those desired outcomes is what financial sustainability is all about – and is what we have done.  

What does that look like more tangibly? A good example last year – and in this year’s budget –was the formation of a Transportation Benefit District that funds local street projects so that, over time, the condition of our street network improves.  

This year, it means: 

• Seed funding for City facilities and fleets. Seeding a fund helps us anticipate repair and replacement needs before instead of after things break, which ends up saving money.  

• A plan to fight off our debt. While debt is inevitable reality for almost all cities as it helps spread longer-term investments more equitably to those who benefit, we are overleveraged and this hinders our abilities to get more accomplished. 

• A rainy-day fund. Such a fund helps us prepare for unanticipated downturns and natural disasters to ensure stability of staffing and services. Putting aside one-time revenue like sales tax from major projects seeds the fund and will provide continuity when we need it most.  

• Strategic staffing. Our staff size has not grown consistently with the population of residents, and we’ve been chronically understaffed for many years. Adding positions like a Parks Maintenance Worker, a Water Distribution Maintenance Worker, a Streets Operator, and a Housing Coordinator help us deliver on our core priorities.  

• Bold housing action. As you may have read in each of our quarterlies to date, the Comprehensive Plan is a major priority for 2025. It is crucial to housing availability and affordability – and fundamental to delivering financial sustainability. More residents add character and help spread the costs of services that we all depend on. Plus, more attainable housing helps local businesses – and the City – recruit and retain employees who provide important services, amenities, and local economic development. Perhaps more importantly, many of our residents suffer from the lack of affordable housing options and housing action is key to a more healthy, safe, and equitable community. 

• Major progress on infrastructure projects. With over $45m of funded infrastructure projects on the books, we continue to move forward with streets, water, sewer, stormwater, parks, facilities and other infrastructure projects that not just catch us up from years of deferred maintenance, but help take us forward in building a stronger, more resilient, and better community for us all. 

Find the 2025 Adopted City Budget linked below.