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West Monroe eyes $17 million budget
It's business as usual in West Monroe as city leaders expect to bank another budget surplus when the current fiscal year ends June 30. Meanwhile, the city of West Monroe anticipates a small budget surplus at the end of the 2009-10 fiscal year, which begins July.
The West Monroe Board of Aldermen is expected to adopt its 2009-10 fiscal year budget at its June 9 regular meeting.
West Monroe finance director Benny Chelette said the city should end the 2008-09 fiscal year with an $840,000 surplus.
He said fuel costs were down this year (2008-09 fiscal year) and didn't hit the city as hard as the prior fiscal year when gas prices hovered at $4 per gallon.
"With natural gas being down, the energy cost is down and all the electricity bills at all the facilities were down, so that helped," Chelette said.
The city of West Monroe anticipates having a $6.1 million fund balance in its general fund at the end of the 2009-10 fiscal year. The general fund budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year is a little more than $17 million.
The proposed 2009-10 budget also calls for a 2 percent pay raise for all city employees, Chelette said.
"We've been giving anywhere between 4 percent to 6 percent, but with the economy the way it is, any pay raise is good," Chelette said.
One of the biggest cost increases in the proposed budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year is the price for health care benefits. The city will increase funding for health care by 18 percent over last year's budget, Chelette said.
"One of the things we were worried about was when 9/11 happened and the stock market plummeted, all our pension matches - police pension, fire pension and municipal pension - went to about 21 percent," Chelette said. "They were around 9 percent."
"Well, with the situation we are in now with the stock market at a lower level than 9/11, we were worried pensions would spike up again," Chelette explained. "When it did that (in 2001) it cost us around $700,000 extra of what the city has to pay into the pension system."
Fortunately, Chelette said the city has been notified by the pension system that they will not increase much.
Police pension went from 9.5 percent to 11 percent; fire pension increased from 12.5 percent to 14 percent; and municipal pension stayed at 13.5 percent.
"That helped us out," he said. "If that would have happened this year, we would have really had to take a hard look at some things. I was worried that 9.5 percent police pension could have been 18 percent."
Regarding revenue, Chelette said the city had a 6 percent increase in sales tax collections last month over what it was for April last year.
However, he prefers to budget revenue collections conservatively.
Chelette budgeted total revenue for the city of West Monroe at $17.4 million for the 2009-10 fiscal year.
"Basically I budgeted it for no growth, so if we have growth, that's just going to be a bigger surplus," he said.
"This is a budget we should hit on the revenue side, and on the expenditure side, we didn't go into any department and cut things they couldn't live with," he said. "All our departments are pretty self-conscious and frugal. We don't have any spending that's unnecessary. Between the expenditures and the revenue, we should not have any problem staying within this budget." |
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