City Government The FY2024 Budget is Taking Shape

The Mayor and Council will have the first Public Hearing for the FY2024 Budget on June 6th at 6:00 PM. There is a second public hearing that will be held prior to the end of June to officially adopt the FY2024 Budget which starts July 1, 2023. The second Public Hearing will be a virtual meeting on a date and time to be announced and published soon.

I know I have written a lot of articles about local governmental budgeting in the past, but there may be some new readers who missed some good information about your city budget, or those who may want a deeper dive into what is collected and how these monies are allocated. As a municipal government, we use what is referred to as fund accounting. All this means is that some monies that are collected are for general use while other monies collected are for specific and sometimes restricted use. Below is an easy-to-follow table that illustrates the different funds we use.

Robert T. Rokovitz, MPA, ICMA-CM

time), finance and human resources (1 full time), information technology (contracted), court services (1 full-time, 3 contracted), police (12 full-time, 2 part-time), fire (11 full-time, 10 part-time, 7 PRN) , public works (9 full-time), parks and recreation (1 full-time, 1 part-time), engineering (contracted), and community development (2 full-time). In total, we have 50 employees made up of 30 full-time employees and 20 part-time employees (not including the Mayor and Council).

So as can be seen, the General Fund is approximately 41% ($4.5M) of the overall $11M budget. The next largest fund is Capital Equipment, followed by TSPLOST and our reserves. The city’s budget is available on our website. Please reach out to me if you have any questions about the budget or other city operations; as I am happy to oblige.

When I present the monthly financials to the Mayor and Council, I make sure to identify the revenues and expenditures while explaining how there are different “buckets” of money that are used for budgeting. So when I say we have an $11M budget, this applies to all the different Funds, which include the General Fund, Debt Service Fund, Hotel/Motel Fund, Technology Fund, Grants Fund, Capital Equipment Fund, TSPLOST Fund, and our reserves. The latter, we strive to keep about 17% of the General Fund available for emergencies.

From an operational perspective, I place more emphasis on the General Fund. This is where we allocate revenue collections for our day-to-day operations to fund our departments such as legislative (Mayor and Council = 6 part time), city manager (1 full time), city clerk (1 full