Jamestown City Council will hold a special voting session tonight to vote to overide the Mayor’s vetoes to the 2023 Budget.
The five vetoes on the voting agenda include Mayor Eddie Sundquist‘s veto of Council’s $75,000 increase to sales tax revenues. The veto of the $6,500 cut to the Mayor’s Office travel and education line. A veto of the $5,600 cut to the Engineering supplies line. The veto of a $3,000 cut to the Jamestown Urban Renewal Agency. And the fifth veto is of the Appropriated Fund balance, which is to allow Council to reappropriate additional funds to balance the 2023 budget should they not override some or all of the vetoes.
Sundquist has proposed a further budget amendment to eliminate a bond interest payment in the amount of $52,964 that was related to the bond payment cut by Council from the budget. He said that by passing the amendment, Council could avoid a full veto override of the three cuts. It would also reduce the sales tax revenue increase needed by $37,864.
Council President Tony Dolce along with Finance Chair and Council Member at Large Kim Ecklund put out a statement last week about the Mayor’s veto of the cut to JURA in response to a news item that ran on a Buffalo television station, WKBW.
Both said the $3,000 cut was to a $5,000 increase from the 2021 budget. In 2021, the JURA budget was increased by $12,000. Dolce and Ecklund said the amount cut by council was “never designated to fund anything specifically for the homeless nor communicated that was the intention.”
They added that “…every department had to be evaluated and cut in places to make up this difference considering we are close to our constitutional tax limit. While we completely understand no one wants a cut we don’t appreciate the false narrative being shared considering the recent story which aired. The City of Jamestown was recently awarded a grant of $194,000 from HUD to address homelessness in Jamestown so this council is not ignoring the issues.”
The special voting session will take place at 6:30 p.m. in the City Council Chambers on the 2nd floor of City Hall. It is open to the public and will be livestreamed on jamestownny.gov.
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