In years past, the annual budget process for Cheney Finance Director Cindy Niemeier has been stormy, particularly when it comes to revenues, which haven’t been all that great lately.
This year, there is much more of a sense of calm. The city is not flush with cash by any means, City Administrator Mark Schuller said, but neither is there a need to drastically sharpen departments’ budgeting pencils and look for spare change in departmental sofa cushions.
“I can’t remember the last time we were able to fund discretionary requests,” Niemeier said. “It’s good for the departments, it’s good for morale.”
Schuller said departments submitted approximately $3.6 million in discretionary spending, some of which are placeholder items for future budgets. Some of those requests came from non-general fund departments as well, who have dedicated funding through specific charges for service such as power bills.
Through the end of September, the city was at 75 percent of its estimated $11.25 million 2016 general fund budget, having received $8,436,384. It’s a fund consisting of seven pots of money.
One of those pots, taxes, shows healthy signs. Cheney has received 56.54 percent of its projected $1,932,600 in property taxes, which includes the levy lid lift and emergency medical services (EMS) levy amounts, with October’s distribution yet to be factored into the equation.
Also contributing to Niemeier’s excitement are general sales taxes, which through September were at $993,140, just over 79 percent of the $1.25 million budgeted for in 2016. That gets better as Niemeier said October’s distribution is 35 percent higher than last October’s figure.
Much of that has been due to construction. Fees for building, plumbing and mechanical permits are $77,736 above the budgeted $166,000 so far, but Cheney also collects sales tax revenue from materials sold for that work.
It’s a battle for the city to make sure they collect their fair share of that revenue, and Niemeier said she has an employee in the department whose only task is to track sales tax. Part of the problem is the city’s tax code is very close to Spokane County’s numerically, and the other is that it’s not only the responsibility of the vendor to use the proper code, but the city can’t contact them directly should they fail to do so.
Niemeier said the city must contact the state Department of Revenue about missing sales tax, who then contacts the vendor. Once Revenue does that, it starts a countdown clock.
“We only have six months to get that corrected through the Department of Revenue,” Niemeier said.
Cheney is also seeing healthy revenue figures so far in other sales taxes such as public safety, criminal justice and lodging. One area not as healthy is brokered natural gas sales, which stands at $62,960 received so far of the projected $165,000. For the 2017 budget, the city is lowering this projection to $118,000.
Utility taxes are solid so far, with a little over 76 percent of the budgeted $2.074 million collected year to date. The city is also at 94 percent of its budgeted $1.3 million charges for services revenue pot, which includes items such as the EWU fire contract, recreation fees, the resource officer contract with the Cheney School District and probation and other court services for not only Cheney, but Medical Lake’s municipal court.
Finally, the 2016 budget is being helped along by a healthy $1.52 million in grant funding — mostly for street and arterial work — of which only $835,112 has been received. Niemeier said in an email that the grant figure was not incorporated fully into the 2016 budget because the city didn’t know how much of what it applied for it would receive.
“When those grants are approved, the budget is amended,” she said, adding that was done this past April.
The City Council was scheduled to begin discussion of its proposed $10,127,300 budget for 2017 at a workshop Tuesday, Nov. 1.
John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.
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