Budgeting the city
By Hot Springs Mayor Don De Vries

With the increased prices we see, especially in oil products, we had a harder time than usual preparing a balanced city budget. The increase in the property tax levy can not increase more than 2.9 percent, the increase in the Consumer Price Index for 2008. State law limits all state taxing entities to this amount, unless they have voted an opt-out from this taxing limit.

I have looked at some of the bigger expenses of the city to attempt to see if the city spends money in generally appropriate areas. The current year budgets for the largest areas are:

Police (without dispatch cost) $447,222. Streets $335,686. Library $201,376. Parks (without cemetery) $90,000. Engineering $82,645. Fire department $79,766. Mueller Center (including budget $41,230 income) $73,158.

I attempted looking at these budgets as they compared to each other, to see if they seemed to fit the needs and priorities of the city of Hot Springs.

It is interesting that the police budget is so much larger than the street budget. It seems to be near other police budgets of the cities I compared, but the streets budget appeared to be less than normal in comparison. I believe what has happened over the last number of years, is to balance the budget, the Street repair budget was continually cut. We need to increase the budget for street maintenance.

I also looked at the cost of operating the library, and the cost of maintaining the parks. The 2008 parks budget included about $23,000 for the skateboard park, so the expense in the parks is not normally as high as it appears here. The library is a great addition to the town with its structure and services provided, but I wondered about the cost of operating it, when the cost is about 60 percent as much as our entire street budget. Another concern I had was that although 31 percent of the library card holders live outside of the city, in Fall River County, only $7,500 was provided to the fund the library from the county taxpayers. After talking with the county commissioners, it is obvious they are also in a budget squeeze, and not much additional money will be available to help fund the library.

The first reading of next year’s budget ordinance for the city will be September 2 at the city council meeting. The budget includes an increase of $40,000 for streets maintenance. The budget also includes a $26,000 cut from the budget request submitted by the library board. I am hopeful the library can raise this revenue from the users of the library, some of which receive the professional library services, but currently do not pay for the expense of operations. This was by far the most difficult decision I proposed in the budget process. If we don’t spend some maintenance money on our streets, fixture costs of rebuilding them will be exorbitant. I wish there were a way to fund even more on street repairs, or better still, fund both the streets and the library.