Council to vote on budget in new venue tonight

All the heavy lifting on the City Council's next budget was completed a month ago when a council majority agreed to freeze commercial and industrial property taxes and to raise residential taxes by 2.89 percent.

On Tuesday evening, the council will formally approve the budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1, the council's first budget under new mayor, Ron Corbett.

Another first: The vote will come in a new temporary home for the council, the council chambers at Hiawatha City Hall, during a meeting that begins at 5:30 p.m.

The Hiawatha council venue, which Corbett has said is more conducive to council meetings, will serve as the council's temporary home until it decides on its permanent home. The council had been meeting in the auditorium of AEGON USA since the flood of June 2008.

One piece of the vote on the new budget will be whether to spend $540,000 to buy an anti-tip guard for the city-issued Yardy carts, which a local inventor says residents need so they don't get hurt,

The council's decision to hold the line on property taxes in the new budget for commercial and industrial property owners came after a series of budget meetings. The first meetings saw department heads present their requests while the last two meetings saw Corbett lead the council through a tedious review of the city's $96 million, property-tax-supported, general-operating budget.

In the end, the council majority balanced the new budget by making some cuts and with the help of $1.8-million in reserve funds, a move that council member Kris Gulick said was a bad business practice.

Corbett argued that the city will still have reserves equal to 31 percent of the general operating budget, which he said he is above the 25-percent level suggested in city policy.

The new budget will add about eight new employees to the city's 1,400-employee work force, with five of the additions going to the city's Finance Department.

The overall size of the city's annual budget normally would be in the range of $350 million when large user-fee-based departments like water and wastewater are factored in. With the city in the midst of a recovery from the June 2008 flood, the size of the budget will be an estimated $635 million for the new fiscal year. Much of the growth represents federal and state flood-recovery dollars coming into the city.

In the proposed new budget, the owner of a $150,000 home will see property taxes from the city portion of the bill go up $30 a year from a current $1,041 to $1,071. The city's portion of the local property-tax bill is less than half of the total, with the school district, Linn County and a few other smaller entities also levying property taxes.