Cleaning Up The City’s Budget Mess Will Be Painful
Mayor Kim Ecklund has been warning all year that the city budget is a mess.
Now, we see just how bad a mess the budget really is – and how much it’s going to cost taxpayers to clean up the mess.
Ecklund is proposing a 7.79% tax levy increase, which equates to a $1.82 per $1,000 of assessed valuation increase to the city’s tax rate.
That money isn’t paying for anything new – it’s paying for overdue bills or increases tied to employee benefits that weren’t properly budgeted for in previous years, though the problems became more acute in last year’s budget.
City Council members knew in December that the 2024 budget was going to miss the mark in several areas, but the decision was made to use the city’s fund balance to pay the increased costs. Part of the problem is it was too late to rewrite tax bills by the time the issues were discovered by Ecklund and former city Comptroller Joe Bellitto during the transition from Mayor Eddie Sundquist to Ecklund.
Using the city’s surplus kept the books balanced this year. But in reality the city should have had a tax increase last year rather than the election-year budget proposed last October that had no tax rate increase with a small increase in the tax levy. Now, we see how that was achieved – by not budgeting properly for employee benefits and sloppy paperwork that led to increased costs or in outside funding that the city is struggling to secure because deadlines weren’t met.
The 7.79% tax increase this year is a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s a bit more palatable when you consider it could have been split over the course of two years.
This budget, as well as the budget Ecklund will present in October 2025, is in form and substance a return to the type of budgeting the city saw under former Mayor Sam Teresi. There are no frills. There are no new initiatives paid for out of the general fund. The city has rung up some expensive bills over the past four years. The next couple of years aren’t going to be easy. The 2025 budget comes with a structural gap because Ecklund is proposing to use $1.7 million in one-shot ARPA and fund balance revenues to balance the 2024 budget while many of the cost increases not left by Sundquist will continue to escalate in 2025.
Jamestown’s fund balance is in solid shape, but the rest of the city’s finances are not. We’re barely keeping our head above water financially. It’s time for a return to fiscal austerity.