A couple days ago the Post Crescent published a good high-level overview of the 2023 executive budget proposed by Mayor Woodford which you can read here: https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/local/2022/10/12/appletons-2023-budget-would-increase-city-property-taxes-6-6/8234248001/.
The proposed budget includes a 6.6% property tax increase, which is an extra $116 on a home valued at $200,000. The sanitary sewer rate would also increase by 4%.
I’ve prepared a PDF of the transcript of the presentation on the 2023 Executive Budget that Mayor Woodford made to the Common Council during the 10/05/2022 Common Council meeting.
In that presentation Mayor Woodford talked about how overall tax collections in the state were going up but shared revenue from the state to municipalities was decreasing. He believed this was a structural issue for local governments in Wisconsin and was meaningfully impacting their ability to deliver services to their residents and maintain municipal operations. [My sense is that this is going to be a talking point that will be brought up at least semi-regularly going forward.]
He also talked about city employees and the work the city had done to attract and maintain employees. They had a number of part-time, non-benefited positions and consolidated them into full-time positions because it was easier to attract workers to full-time positions than part-time positions.
Mayor Woodford was also recommending a 5% merit-based raise for non-union employees which would bring the pay for most positions into market-range. It would also help bring parity between the pay of union and non-union city employees.
He also talked about the city’s borrowing over time and debt reduction plan.
He finished up by talking about emerging challenges particularly in relation to funding IT related expenses as the city moved away from in-house owned software to cloud-based software the city essentially rents with a monthly fee. He stressed that the city could not continue shifting software purchases over to the capital borrowing budget because they were not capital purchases. Instead, these expenses needed to be integrated into departments’ operating budgets.
He also noted two upcoming opportunities for public feedback, one was a virtual public listening session on Tuesday October 18 from 5PM to 7PM. Residents could call the city to register to speak or receive a participation link.
The other opportunity was the in-person Public Hearing on November 2 at 6PM in the council chambers. This did not require pre-registration and was open to anybody who showed up. It will be potentially open to remote participants, but that depends on the state of the renovations City Hall is undergoing and how that impacts their technology.
View full 10/05/2022 Common Council meeting and video with budget presentation here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=997430&GUID=CC2EFB36-498F-4A6B-B4CD-DDA542428A4D
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