The Common Council met 10/04/2023. During that meeting, Mayor Woodford gave a 25 minute presentation on the 2024 Executive Budget and Service Plan.
I’ve prepared a PDF download of the Power Point slides, as well as a transcript of the presentation.
In some respects, the slides speak for themselves, so I won’t go through everything Mayor Woodford said. I will, however, touch on a few things that stood out to me.
A major change in the budget was the increased shared revenue dollars from the state. Mayor Woodford had indicated back on 09/06/2023 that of the $1.9 million additional shared revenue funds Appleton would receive in 2024, he wanted to spend half on infrastructure projects and half on employee compensation and public safety technology equipment. A resolution that would have required the full amount to be spent on infrastructure, utility, or public safety projects (as opposed to employee compensation) was voted down on 09/20/2023, and the Executive Budget aligned with what Mayor Woodford had previously said would be his recommendations, that $963,000 be spent on infrastructure, $165,000 be spent on the Police Department’s Axon body camera contract, and $698,000 go toward the compensation plan for Public Safety employees.
The city’s net new construction came in at just over 2% which Mayor Woodford described as being the best rate of net new construction in recent memory. [I’m not sure how many years “recent memory” is.] This number was what the state would use to calculate Appleton levy increase. Unfortunately, inflation was still up, and had been at around 3.7% in August, and that filtered into every area of the budget.
Mayor Woodford talked about employee levels as well as compensation and benefits. Overall employee levels were going to remain the same from 2023 to 2024, and he was recommending a 3% merit-based increase for non-union employees. The wage increase was one tactic the city was taking to try to be a competitive employer in a tight labor market.
Health insurance costs were going up by 18%. They were responding to this by increasing the amount that employees paid in premiums. [It was not actually clear to me what the numbers were. The slide references “increased employee contributions toward the premium share” which would imply employees already were paying premiums of some kind, whereas, in the presentation, Mayor Woodford said that the city would be “implementing an employee premium share” which would suggest the premium share was a new thing, but that doesn’t make any sense because I find it difficult to believe employees weren’t paying toward their insurance premiums before. Mayor Woodford gave a figure of $44 per paycheck for the family HSA plan and $16 for an individual plan, but he didn’t mention whether city employees are paid on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule. So I have no idea what employee shares of insurance premiums currently are or what they will become under this new budget.]
Mayor Woodford talked about the city’s debt management strategy. The city had levelled off on its total debt service levy and was reducing its borrowing. He noted that with the 2020 budget (which had been approved in 2019 prior to when Mayor Woodford was elected), the city had been on an unsustainable path regarding its total debt. The city was not on a course where it was not piling on debt at an unsustainable rate, and, per Mayor Woodford, “[W]e’ve been able to do this in a way that is controlled, that’s responsible, as opposed to making drastic cuts or further delaying necessary projects for the community.”
The city was still facing some ongoing challenges, some prominent ones being, inflation, wage pressure, and information technology changes, particularly the move away from in-house owned software to essentially renting cloud-based software as a service.
Mayor Woodford finished up by giving some important dates
- October 17, 5-7PM – a public budget listening session
- October 28, 8AM – Finance Committee review (also known as Budget Saturday)
- November 1, 6PM – Public Hearing
- November 8, 6PM – Budget Adoption
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1114840&GUID=AEE88530-319B-4909-B769-B379610CE326
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