This budget season marks the last for outgoing City Manager Gary O’Connell, and it won’t be a pleasant one. The General Fund operating budget decreased .77 percent, or $971,000, from fiscal year 2010 to a total of $126 million.
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Before he starts work as executive director of the Albemarle County Service Authority, City Manager Gary O’Connell has one last budget balancing act—and the General Assembly will send more reductions along. |
“This year is not the worst year,” said O’Connell at the first City Council budget work session last Wednesday, hinting that the next few years might be rougher. The future, in a nutshell, “doesn’t look so good.” Currently, reductions in state funding are at about $890,000.
“We are going to see a lot more budget reductions coming out of this General Assembly,” said O’Connell.
Leslie Beauregard, city’s director of Budget and Performance Management, says that whatever happens to the state budget today will undoubtedly affect fiscal year 2012.
“The most unsettling part is we just don’t know,” she told C-VILLE via e-mail.
It’s not all bad news. While the proposed budget reduces spending, there will be no cuts to services for city residents. Other localities are not so fortunate. O’Connell said that Northern Virginia localities are seeing 7 to 8 percent cuts in their budgets. “We are in a very good place,” he said.
In budgeting, the city analyzes its revenue streams and outlines its expenditures. During the budget work session, O’Connell reinforced the importance of maintaining the city’s bond rating—among 3 percent of municipalities in the nation to have the highest rating, AAA.
Projections of some of the major revenue creators for Charlottesville continue to show the effects of the economic downturn. The sales and use tax, which was nearly $1 million under budget in 2009 and which has been a strong performer in years past, will see a revenue decrease of 5.56 percent, or $550,000, from the 2010 budget. The meals tax increased steadily between 2005 and 2008, but decreased 3.2 percent in 2009 and will drop another 2.86 percent from the 2010 budget.
Snow has been a major factor in decreasing some revenue sources. Parking revenues have seen a sizeable drop. Beauregard said that people are not coming Downtown as much as they used to. “We have offered a lot of free parking lately with the snow,” she said at the meeting. “Hopefully it’ll pick up again.”
In order to help balance the budget, city staff won’t get pay raises for a second year, and won’t see an increase in their health care premiums. All fixed costs were examined and, in the areas of maintenance and fuel, were reduced.
However, the proposed budget includes $2.6 million in new and expanded programs that City Council considers high priorities: the improvement of three routes of the recently renamed “Charlottesville Area Transit”; operating funds for the new Smith Aquatic Center and the Onesty Aquatic Center; and operating funds for the McIntire wading pool.
The budget also includes $300,000 for new sidewalks; $200,000 for improvements to the Belmont Commercial Corridor to address safety and parking issues, among others; and $250,000 to preserve open space. City schools get $40 million from the city, a decrease of .32 percent from 2010.
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