JEFFERSON — Jefferson city council members on Tuesday gathered for a budget workshop and hope to present a balanced budget for adoption by the council's next meeting, Jefferson Interim Mayor Victor Perot said.
Perot said Tuesday the council had asked each city department to cut their projected budget costs by 10 percent, in order to accommodate the uncertainty in the coming year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Perot also said the proposed 2020-21 budget contains $150,000 for street repairs, as each annual budget does, but the city typically holds off and does the street repairs every other year because it can get more value for its money when doing $300,000 worth of street repairs at a time, versus $150,000.
"We typically wait a year until we have $300,000 to put towards the street repairs, then each alderman from each ward selects which streets need to be repaired and each ward gets $100,000 worth of street repairs," Perot said. "We also hope to get some grants or some CDBG money (Community Development Block Grant) for street repairs and then we can put that $300,000 in that and get a whole lot more bang for our buck. We don't yet know if streets will be on this year's CDBG grants but it should be about time for them to come up again."
While the council recently realized a calculation error in the proposed budget, moving the budget from a proposed deficit to a surplus, Perot said the city has since realized some high ticket items it must allow for in the budget.
"We're not going to have near the surplus we had projected but we are expecting to present a balanced proposed budget by next Tuesday's meeting. We do not yet have our tax rate from our tax assessor," he said. "We have been made aware of some high dollar items, one time purchases, we need to include in this budget, including some new hoses for the fire department trucks which are about $15,000 to $20,000. We also have a couple of other items that go into that."
Perot said if there is a surplus, and how much of one, will be dependent on the amount of sales tax generated.
"We could end up with about a $77,000 surplus but that's just a guess," he said. "We've had a mediocre year for sales tax and it will all be dependent on that. There is just so much uncertainty due to COVID-19 and that's why we asked each of our city departments to cut back their budgets by 10 percent. For the 2019-20 fiscal year, about five months of it were without COVID-19 and about seven months of it were impacted by COVID-19. We just don't know if the coming year will have all 12 months impacted by COVID-19 or if this will clear up."
Perot said in regards to the city's sales tax, the addition of the new CEFCO station this year kept the city in the black.
"The new CEFCO truck stop had a nice impact on replacing lost sales tax revenue so we will hit our mark for this year," he said. "Because the majority of Jefferson's economy is driven off of tourism, we just don't know what the next year will hold - will people still travel?"
The proposed 2020-21 budget must be adopted by the end of September.
