The Kenai City Council passed a resolution that would adopt goals to guide the preparation of the Fiscal Year 2023 Annual Budget.
The resolution formally establishes the goals for the City’s FY2023 Budget, which are intended to guide the City Manager in his preparation of the budget which is scheduled to be provided to council in April for consideration with adoption prior to the deadline in June. Especially challenging for the FY23 budget will be the result of the economic pressures not seen in the U.S. for forty years. The inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, second half of 2020 over second half 2021 for Alaska showed an increase of 6.35%.
Finance Director, Terry Eubank, told the City Council:
“It’s certainly the highest level I’ve seen. I know nationally, these are the highest levels of inflation we’ve seen in 40 years since the early 80s and, as a result of that, it’s going to create some significant challenges for the administration and council to put together a budget that’s going to meet the needs of the city. The administration thought, and brought this forward to council, to recommend the adoption of some broad goals that could help guide this process to start off with. I think some of the highlights that I’ve heard is, I think what we are clearly communicating in here is an expectation that a budget be created that will maintain the city’s rates of taxation for both sales tax and property tax in our forecast period, which is about three years. Just some other general goals on the priority in which we are going to try to accommodate some sort of adjustments in compensation levels for city employees and things like that. They’re very broad goals.”
The aforementioned goals were discussed and public testimony was heard at a work session held on January 10th.
