2024 Budget season is here!

The city budget is the most important activity your elected officials participate in every year. Why? Because budget = priorities.

Please take a look below for public hearing dates, how to download and look at the budget yourself, key highlights to help you understand how Fitchburg spends money, and links to department presentations from recent Finance Committee meetings.

THE NEXT STEP is a public hearing on Tuesday 10/10. This is followed by alder amendments, which alders must submit by Friday 10/13 and will be released to the public on 10/20.

SAVE THE DATES

  • PUBLIC HEARING ON OCTOBER 10 at 7:30 p.m.
    Your first chance to comment on what you’d like to see in the city budget. This is three days before alder amendments are due, so if you would like to see a change happen, I encourage you to reach out to your alders in advance.

  • COUNCIL DISCUSSION ON OCTOBER 25 at 6:00 p.m.
    This Committee of the Whole Meeting is focused on discussion of budget amendments. This is where the majority of discussion will take place and your chance to see where your alders stand. Amendments cannot be proposed on the floor.

  • PUBLIC HEARING ON NOVEMBER 14 at 7:30 p.m.
    Your last chance to advocate for issues and changes to the budget. Alders will have submitted amendments already and amendments cannot be proposed on the floor. The discussion among alders is limited during this meeting. This is the meeting where amendments will be voted up or down, followed by a vote on the entire 2022 budget.

  • See full budget schedule.

NAVIGATING THE CITY BUDGET

The full budget document is long and detailed, but if you download it and open it in Adobe Reader, there is a bookmark icon that will show a clickable index of everything included in the budget. For those viewing online or viewing a downloaded copy on your computer, Ctrl + F on your computer keys will allow you to search the document for key words.

INTERESTING HIGHLIGHTS

I wanted to highlight a few interesting sections, charts and visuals that show what the city spends money on to serve residents.

MAYOR’S LETTER

Pages 4-9 is the Mayor’s Letter, which gives context on the choices made in the budget and information on significant changes to the budget since last year.

CITY TAX IMPACT ANALYSIS

Page 15 is a chart that shows you where precisely property tax income is being spent. I highlighted the sections you should notice in yellow. The average assessed home value in Fitchburg going into 2024 is $381,900 which will yield a property tax bill of $2,548.30 (remember, this is only the city portion of your taxes, you also pay county, school, etc). Out of that property tax payment, you can see precisely how much of your tax money goes to each Fitchburg department.

Do your property taxes go where you would like them to go?

CITY REVENUES FOR GENERAL FUND

Looking to page 21, you’ll notice that the property tax impact analysis is crucial to understanding the city budget, because property taxes make up 63.94% of the general fund revenue. The fact that property taxes are the main source of revenue is a fact that’s true for all cities, towns and villages in Wisconsin, as we cannot levy income taxes or sales tax at this level of government, which is different than in other states.

CITY EXPENDITURES FOR GENERAL FUND

Looking to page 20 and going back to how the city spends the revenue it receives (including property taxes), these charts visually show that in two ways. The first by category (Public Works, Public Safety, etc). Take a look.

The second chart shows the breakdown by class. You will notice that the vast majority of the city’s expenditures pay for city staff (personnel), which includes the engineers, librarians, snow plow drivers, building inspectors, police officers and other staff that serve residents.

FULL BUDGET DOCUMENT

And there is much, much more to see. Did one part of the budget strike you as particularly interesting? I encourage you to take a look at that department’s part of the budget. Each department has a great 2-4 page summary that lists accomplishments for this year, plans for next year and significant changes to their budget in the coming year.

As always, feel free to ask me questions; if I don’t know the answer, I can help you find it. And please remember there are public hearings on 10.10 and 11.14!

DEPARTMENT PRESENTATIONS

The Finance Committee held two meetings to hear about the budgets of all the city departments. If you’re interested in hearing more about an individual department and do not want to read the document, you can watch these You Tube videos. You can even watch at 2x speed!

The 10/03 meeting covered the following departments, in this order: Budget Document Logistics, Mayor’s Introduction, Building Inspection, Planning & Zoning, Economic Development, Senior Center, Library, Parks & Recreation, Public Works (including Refuse & Recycling, Water Utility, Sewer and Stormwater), Finance.

The 10/04 meeting covered the following departments, in this order: Human Resources, Clerk, Information Technology, FACTv, Legal, Assessing, EMS, Fire, Police, Administration.

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Budget Amendments Vote on November 14

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Nov 1 Council Meeting: Budget Amendments & Funding for Sustainability Plan