The Common Council met 07/20/2022. During the meeting, Mayor Woodford gave a brief high-level overview of the budget process.
The budget feels like something that happens between October and mid-November; however, they are actually working on the budget almost year-round. The budget process really kicks off in April, but they start talking about the budget even before then. In fact, Mayor Woodford and Finance Director Jeri Ohman had their first discussion back in January.
Right now, departments were hard a work developing their departmental-level budgets.
From there, the Finance Department and Mayor Woodford would start having meetings. They were working on the internal process of the budget development right now. They had currently to the point where they were reviewing the budgets from last year, looking at what was budgeted vs what was actually spent, and thinking about projects that would be coming up in 2023 with the aim of trying to make all the pieces fit.
He noted that the Common Council had talked about some of the challenges that municipalities in Wisconsin have when it comes to funding and revenue. [One such discussion took place when they took up the Water Main Resolution.] He acknowledged that that was a real challenge for them, and they were trying to make it all fit as best they could as they went through this process.
He said they were at the point where they were still waiting on a few key data points that are developed outside of the City of Appleton. The most important one of those points was the calculation of the city’s net new construction which will determine the taxy level. They have been working off of projections in the early part of the process but will get the actual numbers later in the summer.
By September they would be wrapping up the departmental budgets and then would roll all of those departmental budgets into the final draft of the executive budget. The Common Council would receive the executive budget at the first meeting in October.
Mayor Woodford explained that the administration develops the executive budget but it would only become the adopted budget and service plan after the council reviewed it and approved it.
In between the initial presentation of the budget at the beginning of October and its final approval, a lot of deliberation would take place in both the committees of jurisdiction as well as on Budget Saturday. Budget Saturday falls on October 29th this year. It is a Finance Committee meeting, but all the alderpersons attend and go through the budget section by section. [Personally, this year I hope to not get sick for the entire month of October, so that I can cover more of these meetings than I was able to last year.]
Finally, they would hold a public hearing for the budget on November 2 and then the budget adoption meeting on November 9.
He reiterated that this was just a high-level overview intended to give the Council a sense of what the steps were, where they were now in the process, and where they were headed. As they got further in the process, they would talk more about the details of some of the specific steps.
He finished up by noting that there would also be some public information sessions around the budget that would be a little less formal that the budget hearings that they hold at committee and Council meetings. That was something he added a couple years ago.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=980227&GUID=5450AEC9-FD56-4034-8EB4-6AD726AB0B0C
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