2011/2012 budget

With my interesting and exciting life, was sitting around thumbing through our proposed budget tonite. It still needs final council approval, and as mentioned below in other posts, we have had some struggles with our City Clerk Deneen in the hospital. However I'm expecting it to be pretty close to what we have worked out now.

The budget has a lot of individual lines, different revenue sources, breakouts of individual expenses. But just thought I'd drop out the big lines of where we are spending our money. Some are paid for by property tax, and some by user payments, like for sewer and water. Compared to the feds, and our state, I think we run a pretty lean operation here. So here are the big items.

The city collects
$300,000 in property tax
$14,000 in utility tax
$150,000 in Local Option Sales Tax (living in a county with a bunch of college students rocks!)
$119,000 in Road Use Tax (Gas Tax--we can only use that money on streets)
$16,000 from the county towards the library
$181,000 for the sale of water
$143,000 for sewer
$22,000 for swimming pool admissions
$9000 from surrounding townships for fire protection
around $15,000 for interest, license fees, and other miscellaneous stuff
there are some other revenue sources, but it is mostly just in and out stuff like we collect for garbage, and then just pay the garbage contractor--there are some other smaller things like that

Here are the biggies where it goes
Sheriff's Dept for our police protection $60,000
Fire Dept $33,330
Roland Response Team $24,000
Streets paid for via property tax $110,000
Street Lights $21,000
Streets paid for with gas tax $119,000
Mosquito spraying $1900
Contributions (youth sports, senior services, etc) $2800
Library $87,000
Parks $35,000
Swimming Pool $83000
Mayor/Council (salaries, meetings) $3900
City Clerk operations $46000
Elections $1000
Legal Services $4000
City Hall and Buildings $32,000
Liability insurance $10,000
Water dept $141,000
Sewer dept $163,000
then we have a couple thousand here and there for the museum, and the cemetery, animal control

We also have interest payment for well #3 of about $21,000, which we will pay off this year, so yay! Of course, we will start paying on our new streets.

So anyway, this is the high end of where the money goes. Pretty much all areas are similar to the year before. We then can have special projects that are not budgeted for, that may involve borrowing money, or to respond to issues, like a new street, or land shaping to protect against flood damage.

A disclaimer to above, the numbers are rounded, and they are not final until approved by the council. The budget also contains other items, but are simply my opinion of the big and notable items in the budget.

Anyway, hope you find that interesting.