Mayor Woodford Gives Budget Development Process Update, Discusses Inflationary Pressure On City

The Common Council met 09/06/2023. During that meeting, Mayor Woodford gave a brief budget development process update. He outlined some of the inflationary pressures the city is facing and indicated that of the $1.9 million the city had received in additional revenue sharing dollars the Executive Budget would be recommending that half be directed to physical projects related to infrastructure needs in the city and half be directed toward public safety, technology equipment, and compensation and benefits. He indicated that he would be giving a more detailed presentation at the 10/04/2023 Common Council meeting when he would be formally presenting the Executive Budget to the Council.

I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download.

During the update, Mayor Woodford highlighted the impact of inflation on the city’s finances, saying, “inflation for us is no longer sort of a theoretical issue or something that’s happening in the abstract. It’s really affecting every aspect of city operations because we don’t operate in a vacuum. So, we’re subjected to the same effects that every household, business, organization in the country is dealing with. We’re certainly seeing that here.”

• A pumper fire truck that cost $640,000 in 2019 cost $1.1 million in 2023.
• Software services for the city that cost $690,000 in 2019 cost $850,000 in 2022.
• Tipping fees per ton that were $46 in 2019 were $52 in 2023.
• A square yard of concrete that cost $41 in 2019 cost $134 in 2022.

Additionally, the Central Equipment Agency’s allocated expenses would be increasing by $400,000 in this upcoming budget for a variety of reasons that Mayor Woodford would discuss at a later time. The city’s contract with Axon for police body cameras would be increasing by $162,000. And, he estimated that the city’s health insurance expenses for employees in 2024 would increase 18% over 2023’s numbers.

Mayor Woodford went on to say that it was not all doom and gloom, and noted, “We’ve seen the best year of net new construction in the city of Appleton as we’ve had in many, many years. So great news on that front. We’re tracking just over 2% on net new construction, which is which is great for us as a city, and that’ll help on the levy side.”

Finally, he reviewed his provisional recommendation for the $1,926,000 in additional shared revenue funds the city would be receiving. He wanted half of it ($963,000) to be directed toward “physical projects related to infrastructure needs for the city.” The remaining $963,000 he was recommending “be directed toward public safety, technology equipment, and compensation and benefits needs.”

He spoke about the city’s employee compensation and benefits costs and said that if they made no changes to their existing terms, personnel-related expenses alone would increase $1.1 million. That was not even taking into consideration any changes that might result from the negotiations on the police contract the city was about to enter in to.

He summed things up by saying:

Our priorities as we go into this budget, as we’ve been working our way through and dealing with these challenges have been to maintain the service levels that our residents depend on, to retain and appropriately compensate our quality workforce. And we have a great workforce here at the city of Appleton, we take a lot of pride in that. So, we want to retain and appropriately compensate them. Want to accelerate our replacement of aging infrastructure. This has long been an issue we’ve talked about, and we have an opportunity to do that with new funds. And to minimize the impact to taxpayers of these changes.

And I’m pleased to say that we’re on track to deliver just such a budget. But I want to be clear that the days of status quo budgeting, you know, status quo budget, no changes, those days are behind us, at least for the foreseeable future, because we have inflation far outpacing then new resources that are coming in. So, it means we have to make changes and be creative about how we meet the needs of the community.

View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1114838&GUID=98D146C3-542F-4487-93F3-233C8103D43D