Decatur City Hall

The Decatur City Commission received a draft of the Fiscal Year 2016 budget on Monday, May 18. 

It wasn’t published on the city’s website beforehand. When Decaturish asked for a copy, Assistant City Manager Andrea Arnold said it would be published on the city’s website this Wednesday, May 20. 

“This budget does propose a millage decrease,” Arnold said during the May 18 commission meeting. “Right now currently the city is at 13 mills. We are proposing a 1 mill reduction to 12. Just so people know, for the owner of a $500,000 house, that would be an annual savings of roughly $240. The cost to the city for that millage reduction would be $1.5 million.” 

Arnold said the tax digest for the city has gone up by 20 percent. 

“We don’t have the final numbers from the county,” Arnold said. “We do understand the county did approve the digest values at their meeting last Thursday, but they’re not going to release the final numbers to us until Friday.” 

She said of the 20 percent increase, 15 percent of the increase is from revaluation of homes and another 5 percent is from new property on the city’s tax rolls. 

“In terms of the budget that’s being funded by the tax dollars, in addition to this being your FY 15-16 proposed budget, we also kind of true up the current year budget and we refer to that as the revised budget, so the FY 14-15 revised budget is 2 percent more than what was adopted last year at this time,” Arnold said. She said details of why the budget increased would be discussed in an upcoming work session. 

The adopted budget for Fiscal Year 2014-2015 is $46 million, which includes a $21.8 million general fund budget. Revised budget figures were not available as of May 18. 

Arnold said the largest new capital item in the budget is $1.5 million earmarked for improvements at Oakhurst and McKoy parks. 

Commissioners will discuss the budget during a work session on June 1 and will consider approving the budget on June 15. The city’s Fiscal Year starts July 1.