City Council Finance Committee Chair Brent Sheldon reads amendments to the 2025 City Budget (November 25, 2024)
Jamestown City Council has approved a budget for 2025 with a 3.6% tax increase.
This tax increase is half of what was initially proposed in Mayor Kim Ecklund‘s executive budget.
Council passed nine amendments to the executive budget. Those included adding $10,000 to the Police Departments fuel line that brings it in line with what was budgeted for 2024, a $4,760 and $339 increase in longevity for staff and the Comptroller in the Comptroller’s budget; a $2,000 decrease in the Human Rights Commission‘s budget which is in line with spending for 2024, a $50,000 increase to the Medicare premium for retirees line, an increase of $87,251 in sales tax revenue, an additional $500,000 from the American Rescue Plan Act funds, and an additional $125,000 from the unassigned fund balance.
Ecklund said the total use of $1.5 million in ARPA funds toward the budget essentially wipes out that funding pool for the City. She said the total taken out of the unassigned fund balance for the budget was $825,000.
Council President Tony Dolce said the lower tax increase passed by Council is more palatable than the initial proposal, “There’s a lot of red flags in there. We’re dipping into the Fund Balance more than we really want to.. the extra $125,000 after what was already taken out of there which brings it down to around $4 million, which is more than we’ve had in the past but certainly less than we’d like to have. And pretty much using the rest of ARPA. I know there’s some unallocated monies or unspent monies out there, so we’ll have to go through those to see if there’s a few hundred thousand dollars that hasn’t been expended that could be put back in there.”
A house assessed at $100,000 in the city would roughly see their taxes increase by $88 for the year, or a $7.33 increase a month from the 2024 amount.
Ecklund said the process to create the 2025 budget was never going to be easy after the discovery of issues with the 2024 budget at the beginning of the year, “I hate to say it but almost every day, every week, there was another surprise. Overall, I think that they (City Council) kind of knew what was coming but that also left it in a position where there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room. We cut departments to bare bone minimum, made some really tough decisions. If you remember from the budget release it was a 79% (tax) increase in the first go around and that’s absolutely not possible. So, I was happy with the 7.71% (tax increase). As happy as I could be. I hated every moment of delivering that to the taxpayers, but on the other hand I knew that was the best that we could deliver.”
Ecklund now has until Thursday, December 5 to decide whether to veto any of the amendments passed by Council.
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