City Budget Hearing Scheduled

The City Council has announced the date for the hearing that will be held for the public to comment on Republican Mayor Erin Stewart’s city budget plan.

Stewart has presented her budget plan for the budget year that begins on July 1, 2019 and ends on June 30, 2020. The City Charter requires that the Council hold at least one public hearing on the mayor’s budget plan. The budget will also include the property tax mill rate for tax bills that will go out this July and in January of 2020.

The Council’s President, Ald. Eva Magnuszewski (D-AL) has announced that the public hearing on the budget will be on Tuesday, April 30, 2019. It will held at 7:00pm in the Council Chamber on the second floor of City Hall at 27 West Main Street.

Stewart’s budget would keep the city property tax mill rate at 50.50, a year after she was faced criticism for unilaterally increasing property taxes last year. Her new budget would appear to bring up to $26 million the amount that current year taxes have increased during her administration.

Stewart has also come under criticism for repeatedly flat-funding city schools, but her budget plan for the upcoming year would reportedly transfer a state education grant of perhaps $3.1 million to the school system. While that amount would appear to represent her largest single year increase for city schools, her previous years of flat-funding would appear to leave Stewart’s support for local schools with less than a one percent per year increase over the six years of her administration.

Her budget plan for the upcoming year has also been criticized for its reliance on one-time revenue and the apparent long-term deficits that her budget may create.

While the Council is technically able to approve a budget different than the mayor’s plan, the mayor can veto it. Unless that Council can overturn the mayor’s veto by the deadline in the City Charter, the mayor’s budget takes effect without the Council’s approval.

Since “overriding” a veto takes the support of ten of the fifteen Council members, and there are nine Democrats and six Republicans, Stewart and the Council Republicans can block the Democrats from approving their own budget plan if Stewart disagrees with it. That is effectively what happened last year.

The Council has sixty days, under the Charter, after Stewart proposed her budget plan, to take action on it. That would make the deadline for Council action Sunday, June 9th.