Officials anticipate little change in city’s portion of property tax bills
By Jennifer Eisenbart
Staff writer
As the City of Burlington nears the end of its budget process for 2012, it looks like city taxpayers will avoid a tax increase for next year.
That isn’t exactly a surprise, given that Gov. Scott Walker basically froze all local governments at their 2011 tax levy rates, but the city could have either held a referendum to raise taxes or raised the levy to handle debt service.
However, with Tax Incremental Finance District 4 closing early and the city maintaining a healthy fund balance, City Administrator Kevin Lahner said Tuesday the average taxpayer won’t see much of a change – if any – on their city part of the tax bill.
“The tax bill on the average home is going to be almost exactly the same,” Lahner explained. “Our levy is actually going to go up slightly because we have additional levy capacity due to the TIF closing.
“But the overall tax burden for the citizen is going to be roughly the same.”
The city budget hearing Tuesday night passed without comment, as no one in the audience had a question or even requested that Lahner make his short presentation on the budget. Since City Council members had already seen it, they declined as well.
Lahner said the mill rate will go up an unspecified amount (the city is still waiting for final manufacturing values from the state) but because property values have dropped, tax bills should be where they were last year.
The city lost, in total, about $119,000 in state aid, but because of overall tightening of the belts by various offices through increasing efficiency or cutting costs – and because the city chose not to rehire one open police position – the impact of that is negligible.
The police position won’t actually result in any loss of service, according to the department, because of increased efficiency in staffing there as well.
Lahner said that, because the city had maintained a healthy fund balance, it was also time to use a little bit of it to balance the budget – to the tune of about $500,000.
“Ours is actually very, very good, which is why it’s appropriate to bring it down,” Lahner said. “We have the luxury to bring that down slightly.”
The fund balance, Lahner said, will still be at approximately 32 percent of the total expenditures – whereas the recommended amount, Lahner said, is about 25 percent.
Lahner also said that since the city’s bond rating had been upgraded to a double-A-minus, the city was saving money there as well.
“That’s just a reflection of our management practices,” he explained.
Starting next year, the city will be rolling out what Lahner called a “performance-based budget.” Departments will be collecting a wide variety of data indicating everything from performance to spending to efficiency to investment returns, and it will be posted on the city website as a “performance dashboard.”
In addition to what Lahner hopes will be an added layer of transparency to the process, it will play a part in sketching out the 2013 budget, he said.
“That’s one piece of the puzzle in terms of budgeting decisions,” Lahner said.
The budget will go before the City Council for approval at the Dec. 6 meeting.
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