“What you’ll see here is a balanced budget with a healthy dose of ... optimism,” Mayor Mark Kruzan said to open up the first session.
Next year’s budget is projected to have a $211,387 surplus , up from the $722,651 deficit for 2014, according to the 2015 budget proposal.
The most drastic changes were under the engineering department and planning department , which merged this year to become simply the Planning Department, cutting all of the engineering department’s individual budget and increasing the Planning Department’s budget by 48 percent.
The City of Bloomington Clerk’s office also requested to raise its budget by 31 percent to fund technology required to help the agency digitize city records. The clerk’s office budget is the second smallest of all the agencies at $247,027.
The Public Works Department’s main budget is seeking a 22-percent decrease because of some mergence with the controller’s office, Public Works Director Susie Johnson said Thursday. Its facilities budget will see a 25-percent increase as it takes authority over city parking garages.
The rest of the departmental budgets remained stagnant or saw relatively small changes, ranging in increases of 6 percent to decreases of 5 percent.
Because council members were not permitted to ask questions during these meetings, presentations ran swiftly, with each department detailing accomplishments of the year so far, their goals for 2015 and proposed budgets.
Council members moved to submit questions to individual departments by Friday at noon. Public comments were allowed Tuesday through Thursday following individual presentations.
“The process by which we are moving forward by prohibiting questions highlights a different way of transparency in budget hearings,” Bloomington City Council President Darryl Neher said during closing remarks at Thursday night’s meeting.
Council member Stephen Volan was critical of the new process, saying the public may have missed out on layers of the budget by not hearing the back-and-forth discussion of the council.
Questions will be compiled into a document and posted online for the public in the future at bloomington.in.gov/council.
Projects and goals for each department in 2015 were detailed during presentations, including the Planning Department’s goals of fixing the visibility at the intersection of 17th Street and Jordan Avenue for drivers and pedestrians and finishing the Imagine Bloomington project, a comprehensive plan to detail the goals of the city by 2024.
Other departments requested appropriations for their supply budgets, such as the city clerk’s office request to pay for Adobe Pro subscriptions and the police department’s request to purchase new radio batteries and bulletproof vests.
Money used for the general fund, the dollars being appropriated to these budgets, comes from property tax, county option income tax and miscellaneous revenues. Property tax revenues are set at a levy managed by the state, limiting what the city can raise based on non-farm income. Bloomington is currently within the bounds a 2.6 percent levy.
These proposals are an informal beginning to the budget-approval process. A formal legislative packet sent to the city council by the mayor’s office, which includes the formal budget, will be out and discussed at a public meeting scheduled for Sep. 23. The council will move to adopt the budget Oct. 8.
The city council has the authority to decrease advertised revenues and expenditures but cannot increase them.
The adopted budget must then be sent to the state by early November to be approved. Bloomington’s fiscal year is in sync with the calendar year.
