No tax increase in new city budget

Shelbyville's city council is looking at passing a trimmed down budget with no tax hikes when members gather Thursday evening for their regular monthly meeting.

This year's budget sports a much lower deficit than the previous year's numbers -- $51,659, compared to the budgeted deficit of fiscal year 2008-09 that totalled $565,827.

According to city manager Ed Craig, the numbers for the next fiscal year contain no increases in either tax rates or pay raises.

The proposed 2009-10 budget lists revenue of $12,041,519 and expenses of $12,093,178, leading to the reduced deficit of $51,659.

While $51,000 is a lot of money, compared to a $12 million budget, that figure as a deficit "is a very small percentage," Craig said. "You can't get much closer than that."

The deficit represent 0.4 percent of the 2009-10 budget.

"It is a bare bones budget," Craig said, adding that city department heads have "worked hard to trim the budget as much as we can."

The 2009-10 budget contains no capital appropriations "and is a straight operating budget," Craig said.

The deficit for this year's budget is expected to be around $530,000 once the figures from the last two months of the fiscal year come in, Craig said, explaining that the city is still "pretty much on budget" for the year.

That's even though the city had two large unexpected expenses: the demolition on East Depot Street, costing the city $225,215, and the settlement of the lawsuit brought by former codes official Wayne Williams, at a cost of $180,000 plus legal fees.

The city is currently in the process of litigation to recover the Depot Street expenses from Alice Albrecht, the owner of 109 E. Depot, the building that was deemed too dangerous to leave standing.

Craig said that the city "simply managed our expenses better over the past year," to cope with the unexpected spending, "$400,000 worth of budgeted expenditures (last year) weren't made."

Another reason the deficit is greatly reduced this year is the fact that the city no longer has to pay the $523,000 debt service on Shelbyville Recreation Center, which has been paid off.

Even though there was a $250,000 increase in health insurance and pension fund costs last year, "working through each line item in the budget. ...detail by detail, to reduce individual line items," helped to cut back expenses, Craig said

Craig described the budget as "a plan, a guide for us to go by, and then we try to execute that plan in as a conservative method as we can so we can save as much money as possible."