City Council members are poised tonight to pass a budget with much less of a tax increase than was proposed a month ago by Mayor Kim Ecklund.

That’s good in the short-term. The increase in costs that we have seen across the board has pinched many homeowners’ budgets, so even small tax increases add on to the total increase in costs for everything from utilities to basic household items that have hit all of us.

City officials have suggested adding $63,099 in expenses back into the budget, cutting $23,647 in health insurance expenses and $2,000 for the city Human Rights Commission. The biggest changes are in revenue, where Finance Committee members are proposing to boost 2025 sales tax projections by $87,251 based on third quarter sales tax receipts this year, using an additional $500,000 in American Rescue Plan funds and an additional $125,000 from the fund balance. Those changes will be introduced and approved on the floor of tonight’s council meeting. Further changes could be suggested at the last minute, though that didn’t seem likely after last week’s council meeting.

The pain is less this year. Taxpayers appreciate that. But the budget itself is out of balance. There won’t be $500,000 in ARPA funding available next year. Ecklund’s budget proposed using $700,000 from the city’s surplus to balance the budget, and council members want to use an additional $125,000 – bringing the expected fund balance at the end of 2024 down to $4,940,228. That type of fund balance use is only sustainable for about five years before the surplus is gone. That means more revenue is needed either from the state, from city taxpayers or other sources.

We said recently that Ecklund’s budget was very much a return to the types of budgets we saw from former Mayor Sam Teresi. That analogy extends to the council as well. This is a pre-2020 budget in more ways than one. Council members gave taxpayers an aspirin for this year’s budgetary headache. The early signs for next year’s budget say taxpayers will need prescription-level medication to ease the pain caused by the 2026 budget unless something changes between now and then.