At a Finance Committee meeting Thursday night, the Juneau Assembly developed a plan to close its multi-million dollar budget gap created by legislative inaction and a handful of gubernatorial in late June.<\/p>\n
Days before Juneau\u2019s budget for fiscal year 2017 became effective at the start of July, Gov. Bill Walker cut about $1.3 billion in state spending using his veto power to try and fill Alaska\u2019s then-$4 billion budget hole.<\/p>\n
Walker\u2019s vetoes left the city\u2019s previously balanced budget roughly $4.8 million in the red, but the Assembly now has a plan to cover most of that.<\/p>\n
The Assembly will cover the majority of its deficit using its available fund balance. The city will pull about $2.8 million out of the available fund balance, which is currently about $12.3 million.<\/p>\n
That fund is an amalgamation of years of city revenue savings and leftover money from capital improvement projects. After the city pulls the $2.8 million it needs from the fund, it will still have a balance of between $8 million and $9 million \u2014 well above the recommended $4 million to $5 million threshold the city doesn\u2019t want to dip beneath.<\/p>\n
\u201cA balance of $8.4 million, we believe, still provides a reasonable cushion if things come up,\u201d City Finance Director Bob Bartholomew told the Assembly at the meeting. \u201cI think we have sufficient savings even if we go directly to the available fund balance.\u201d<\/p>\n
The city will use $696,000 previously allocated to deferred facility maintenance to help cover the deficit. Drawing a couple million out of the available fund balance was a fairly easy decision for the Assembly; using the deferred maintenance money wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Assembly members Debbie White and Mary Becker initially took issue with using these funds.<\/p>\n
White likened deferred maintenance to car repairs, explaining that if you don\u2019t replace your breaks when you need to, the problem will get worse and affect your rotors as well. Putting off building maintenance will only make for more costly and extensive repairs later, White argued.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got city employees that are working in facilities that are pretty much falling apart,\u201d she told her colleagues.<\/p>\n
Several of her peers and Bartholomew pointed out that the city still plans to spend about $2.5 million on deferred maintenance in the coming year. This was enough for White to withdraw her objection.<\/p>\n
The city will look to find a total of $500,000 in general government operating budget savings, and it will $400,000 of sales tax revenue generated during the last fiscal year to cover the rest of the deficit.<\/p>\n
This all adds up to about $4.4 million, a little shy of the roughly $4.8 million budget gap, but the Assembly will have to wait until its next Finance Committee meeting in early November to figure out how it will cover the remaining portion of its deficit.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s because Gov. Walker\u2019s vetoes cut into the Juneau School District\u2019s budget by about $450,000. And before the Assembly can determine how it wants to make up for the lost funding, it has to figure out how much money the state will be giving the school district.<\/p>\n
Late last month, JSD officials were somewhat shocked to find that their projected enrollment numbers were too low, off by more than 210 students.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, the school district\u2019s Finance Director David Means said that the additional students could mean an increase in state funding of about $1.5 million. The Assembly won\u2019t know how to address this last piece of the deficit until the enrolled-student count is finalized in late October, and the school district knows how much additional funding it will get from the state.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At a Finance Committee meeting Thursday night, the Juneau Assembly developed a plan to close its multi-million dollar budget gap created by legislative inaction and a handful of gubernatorial in late June. Days before Juneau\u2019s budget for fiscal year 2017 became effective at the start of July, Gov. Bill Walker cut about $1.3 billion in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":9658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-9657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9657"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=9657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}