On September 11, 2023, at 5:30 p.m., the Kearney City Council held a special meeting to conduct three public hearings: the City of Kearney 2023-2024 Fiscal Year Budget, the 2023 property tax request, and the Offstreet Parking District No. 1 Budget. Finance Director Kayla James presented the budget details. No members of the public spoke during any of the hearings. The council voted to close each hearing and adjourned.
City of Kearney Budget for 2023-2024
Setting the 2023 Property Tax Request
Offstreet Parking District No. 1 Budget for 2023-2024
No further actions were taken; the resolutions for the property tax request and fee schedule changes are scheduled for the next regular council meeting on September 12, 2023.
We will start. Well, uh the open meeting act. Uh we have uh pursuant to section 84 1412 and brass require statutes. Is available units on the wall. We take the role, please. Yeah, class here. Bush cutter here. We are absent, Nicola. Yeah, more here. Hey, regular agenda item three is a public hearing on the City of Carney budget for the 2023 2024 fiscal year. Good afternoon, Kayla James, Director of Finance. I'm here to give you the details of the proposed 2023-2024 budget. So if you have any questions along the way, please just jump in. Um, I'll be glad to stop and answer any questions that you have. So the first slide here is the proposed expenditures by fund. Um, obviously the general fund is the big hitter here. Um we've got 35,778,000 budgeted for uh expenditures in the general fund, and that is up 2.3 million or 7% from last year. Um the other funds are 123 million six hundred and sixty-two thousand eight fifty-seven. That number is down from last year by ten million dollars or eight percent, and that's for various reasons. Um, mostly because in the enterprise fund last year, we had $15 million more expenditures. Um we had seven million dollars more expenditures last year for the sewer last year, and um $7.6 million dollars less expenditures last year for the airport. So that kind of drives most of that $10 million difference. So the total uh expenditures for the city next year, $159,441,000 down $8 million in total for a 5.87% decrease from last year. And like I said, there's a there were a lot of lot more extraordinary items last year in the other funds. Let's see if we can I can walk and chew gum at the same time. Okay, so this slide is new. Um I just wanted to showcase this. If you'll notice the budgeted um for 2324, this is just the general fund. So you can see here that the expenditures are outpacing our revenues here. And I just thought graphically, it says for 2324, but you can see the last three years that's been the trend. And so, you know, this kind of illustrates Jonathan, what you were asking about, you know, we have rising costs, but we have less expenditures, but general fund doesn't really have anything extraordinary in it. So this is kind of a good representation of what's happening. Um we have more expenditures, less revenues, which in turn reduces fund balance. So you can see here the fund balance is kind of tracking down for the general fund also. Are we trying to get to 25% on our fund balance? Is that what we should for? Is that right? So yeah, yeah. And if we were not so sales tax driven, we would not normally you'd be 15 to 18. So 7.5 is right in that range, then is that correct? Okay. Uh the 7.5 is right in the range for what our fund balance should be for general fund. To mean our fund balance policy. Yeah. Yes, yes. We keep our policy is 25% generally first once. Yeah. So just thought this was an interesting slide. You know, and you know, can we reduce our expenditure? Sure, we can do that.