The Kenai City Council held a work session on Monday discussing FY23 budgetary goals. The purpose was to introduce a list of recommended goals for the council’s consideration. Eight specific goals have been outlined with the intent to provide direction in the development of the proposed FY23 budget.
City of Kenai Mayor Brian Gabriel told KSRM:
“So, administration had requested that we have a work session to go over how they intend to put the budget together and then to get council’s input ahead of that process. Our administrative staff spends a lot of time starting now and we’ll have a budget work session open to the public once we get the budget, which will happen about April. What they do is they spend a lot of time going through that and I think, from their perspective, they just wanted to get some buy-in from council, or at least have some confidence from the perspective of council that what they’re doing moving forward up until we do the budget is sort of coincides with the direction that the council would like to see. They fleshed out these goals that they will be trying to meet as they put the budget together.”
In talking about the goals recommended by the administration, Mayor Gabriel says:
“They are goals. They are not definitive targets. In other words, I think one of the first goals is to try to develop the budget to maintain the current sales and property tax. They’ve been able to do that for a number of years now, but as we move forward, we’ve got inflation. As we move forward, if they don’t meet that goal, they can explain to why that goal wasn’t met and there’s some context to that, too, because, ‘hey, this is the target we were shooting for and we won’t be able to reach that, and here’s the reason why,’ as opposed to just getting a budget and not knowing specifically what were you targeting when you put this budget together, if that makes sense.”
BudgetFY23