City of Evanston

Budget Process Begins

Posted by Wally Bobkiewicz on Sep 10, 2010 at 8:01 AM in Administrative Services

Believe it or not, we are gearing up for preparation of FY 2011 budget.

The City is transitioning to a calendar year fiscal year away from our current March 1 – February 28 year. The biggest reason for this is to give Council flexibility in changing property tax rate to occur in a timely manner to impact the budget. The levy must be set by December 15 each year. When we do a budget in February and the Council changes the levy, the levy change does not occur until almost a year later.

The budget for 2011 will be a 10 month transitional budget to this new calendar (March 1-December 31, 2011). The Council will be considering the budget in the new cycle this year with the proposed budget set to be submitted to the Council on Friday October 8.

Next Tuesday night is the first of two community budget workshops to get citizen input on our budget preparation. Meeting is in Council Chambers at 7 PM. We will be telling the Council that we are in generally good shape in the current year and are projecting a deficit for 2011. The projected deficit is still being refined to share at the meeting on the 20th. It will be significantly less than the deficit we faced last year. We are also grappling with converting 12 month projections to 10 month projections. Unfortunately revenues and expenditures are not equally distributed throughout the year, so it is not as simple as 10/12ths of a regular budget. 

The second budget workshop is scheduled for Wednesday September 29 at 7 PM at the Levy Center. I hope that we will come out of that meeting with meaningful suggestions for adjustments to the budget.

Budget documents will be found on the City's website:  www.cityofevanston.org/budget


That’s the latest. Please let me know any questions or comments.



Wally

Topics: Budget