There’s another special city council meeting, specifically a budget meeting, set for this evening. It’s apparently a follow-up of what they discussed last week. On Thursday, the council held a joint meeting with the finance advisory committee to outline a proposed 5 percent reduction in city department budgets for fiscal 2018. This equates to nine…
Tag: budget
Anatomy of DeKalb’s proposals for a sales tax hike
That’s not a typo in the headline. There are, I believe, two proposals for a sales tax hike of one cent for fiscal 2018. One comes from DeKalb city administrators, the other from the city’s finance advisory committee (FAC). Here’s the proposal staff put into the draft budget: Sales tax for hiring police officers? Sales…
DeKalb, I’ve got your new police officers right here
DeKalb staff are proposing a one-cent rise in the local sales tax in order to meet next fiscal year’s budget beginning January 1, 2018. They’ll tell you this is about street improvements, but they didn’t care about that last year or the year before, so I believe anything promised for streets is a sweetener to…
DeKalb may raise taxes, but the structural budget issue remains
DeKalb’s Financial Advisory Committee (FAC) will be recommending that the city council raise the property tax levy by $954,000, and its local (home rule) sales tax by one cent, in the fiscal year starting January 2018. The property tax recommendation was approved by the FAC in early October, and the sales tax during a meeting…
City of DeKalb’s share of county property taxes, not including the latest wish list
If you haven’t heard, the DeKalb is setting a property tax “ceiling” during its regular meeting tonight. This is a legal-beagle advance notification of the highest aggregate amount that DeKalb could possibly ask for when the council sets the levy during its first meeting in December. What a piece of luck, because recently I’ve been…
TIF spending for streets in FY16 did not come anywhere near what DeKalb is claiming
The setup: During the special Committee of the Whole meeting of Monday evening, DeKalb council members were discussing with staff a proposed budget reduction in 2018 for the street improvement program in our two TIF districts, specifically a staff recommendation to cut in half the usual $1 million budgeted for streets in the TIFs. During…
DeKalb’s HR budget is out of control, and now they want to make it even worse
DeKalb’s Human Resources budget growth by fiscal year (rounded): 2014: $164,000 (actual) 2015: $184,000 (actual) 2016: $254,000 (actual) 2017: $456,000 (projected) In FY14, there was one full-time director and one part-timer in HR. Before that, there were some difficult years where HR had only one director, and the assistant city manager helped fill the gaps…
Why did DeKalb change its employee numbers going back 10 years?
I was looking up city budgets yesterday and thought that information on numbers of employees would help provide more context for what I was seeing. My resource for this is the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), not the CAFR itself, but a report appended near the end of the document that’s called “Full-Time Equivalent Employees,”…
Pie is for Bureaucrats, Not Streets People
A friend of mine asked a couple weeks ago whether there is some way to calculate how much growth there’s been of bureaucrats in city government. Like many locals, I know that the DeKalb city manager has been generally allowed to spin off new departments and hire new administrators without restraint, but we’re somewhat lacking…
Pension Plan Membership as a Factor in Jump of Net Pension Liability
DeKalb’s latest Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) is out. It covers Fiscal Year 2016, which ended June 30, 2016. The big news is the net pension liability. Public safety expenses related to the operations of both the Police Department and Fire Department accounted for the largest share of expenses at $33,400,660 or 50.1% of the…