Council Hears Annual Budget

Hebron city officials heard the annual budget request during a postponed meeting Wednesday, September 9. The meeting was postponed due to the Labor Day holiday.

City accountant Brian Blobaum told the council that the projected bank balance was $4,391,000, not counting the community center bequest the city continues to spend on.

“How do we fit against others years without that bequest?” asked Blobaum. “We ended up with $4.27 million last year and the year before $4.105 million. So we can see we are basically going to be in the same cash position. There’s no big change, no reason for alarm.”

Council member voted to transfer $250,000 from the electric fund to the general fund at Blobaum’s suggestion. This is done by declaring there is excess money in the electric fund and then approving the transfer.

“Every few years, because of the nature of our revenue stream,  we have to supplement the governmental funds, which include the general, the street and the library, with money from the utility fund,” said Blobaum. “Propery tax has been really stagnant over quite a few years while the normal increase in health insurance and costs and repairs continue to go up by inflationary amounts …  for quite a few years we’ve been supplementing the governmental funds with utility money.”

The last time the council did this was in 2012 when they also transferred $250,000. Previously, they have also transferred $150,000 in 2007 and $176,000 in 2009.

“We don’t like to do that every year because there’s a lid law issue regarding budgeting to do it so we only like to do it every couple of years.”

State statutes impose a ‘lid bill,’ which seeks to limit the growth of budgeted restricted funds revenues.

The City, by state statute, sets the property tax requested for the general fund and the bond fund and sets the maximum allowed expenditures for the city for the 2015-16 fiscal year.

The council voted to approve to change the property tax request from the year before.

The 2015-16 property tax requests were set at $265,137 and the 2015-16 property tax bond requests were set at $17,052.

Last year, the property tax was set at $258,299 in the general fund. The bond fund property tax was set at $16,588.

Other mentioned funds can be found in Blobaum’s report where a copy is kept on file at the city office.