NOTN- The City and Borough of Juneau’s Assembly began early budget discussions on Wednesday, bracing for a projected $6 million loss following the passage of two ballot measures exempting food and utilities from local sales tax.
Finance Committee Chair Christine Woll said the Assembly convened sooner than usual, typically, the city begins its budget process in December to address the significant fiscal impact of the new exemptions, which take effect next month.
“When food and utilities become tax exempt for residents here next month that will, impact the amount of money the city is taking in.” Woll said, “And essentially the high-level message coming out of that meeting was the assembly wants to use those extra savings we ended up with at the end of last year to take our time, to really look at our whole city budget with the public and talk about what priorities we have before making any large cuts.”
Still, Woll said city departments have been directed to “tighten spending” and pause new projects until the Assembly determines long-term strategies to balance the budget.
“You won’t be seeing the pool hours changing, or any of our facilities being shut down immediately.” Said Woll, “As we think towards next year, we will see significant service reductions, and we don’t want to make those decisions too early before getting a lot of input from our community. But you know, in anticipation of some big cuts, we asked our city manager to be pretty conservative.”
Woll added that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fully fund Phase Two of the HESCO barrier flood protection project helped to relieve financial pressure, but doesn’t have any impact on the city’s budget.
“We really didn’t have funding in place for it, and so it was going to be very complicated, especially with the ballot initiative passing, that had really tied our hands.” she said, “Unfortunately, because it wasn’t in our budget, it doesn’t replace any funding. It doesn’t give us more funding, but it does mean that we can move forward with a project that otherwise I’m not sure we were going to be able to do.”