The Budget

We are going to get our budget finalized at the meeting on Wednesday. We are pretty close to done. Really the only thing left is deciding on the pool's budget, and what employee raises may be in order.

We are in really good shape for the 12-13 fiscal year, which is nice. On the revenue side, we are projecting an extra $20,000 in property tax revenue, based on increased valuation in the city, and then projecting another $10,000 in local option sales tax money. We also have paid off the bond for the newest well. So with that, the levy rate will go down from $10.38 per $1000 to $10.07. That is nice to have levy rates able to go down.

All departments did a pretty good job in watching dollars. Here's the high level expenditures. The Sheriff is billing us more for police protection. Even though we lost 40 people in the last census, police protection is up from $59,900 to $63,558.

Fire department down some. 33330 to 33226
Roland Response team 24320 to 24370
Streets from property tax the same at 110,000. And streets money that comes from gas tax from 120780 to 122696.
Library up 84148 to 92455. We are having to pick up some additional costs in the library.
Park 34559 to 29200
Administration 31619 to 77814. The big jump here is we are budgeting for a new location for City Hall. We are planning on starting fixup of the old library building, and moving in there once this budget year is upon us, in July 2012. We have $50,000 set aside for that. So minus that, the administration budget is actually going down a bit.

Other notes, still waiting on the pool budget,(It will be around 80,000) and all numbers above are if the employees got a 5% raise. I'm speculating that won't happen, so the numbers for the coming year will still go down a little bit.

We have other minor expenditures too, but they are all pretty much the same, like museum, cemetery, mosquito spraying, etc.

I didn't include water or sewer, because they are run more like a non-profit business, we estimate costs, and set the rates to come out even, with money set aside for capital projects, like new lines and such. We are setting aside money to paint the water tower. It has not been painted since it was constructed in 1995. So it is approaching 20 years, so it has served us well for the past 17 years. Also expect an increase in the sewer bills, as we need to start setting aside money for major sewer projects, many due to requirements placed upon us by the DNR.

So there is the high level run down. Hope that makes sense!