MERRILL, WI (WSAU) — After a veto on the original budget, the City of Merrill has found a budget compromise for 2019.
At a special meeting on Wednesday night, the Merrill City Council approved a revised 2019 budget 6 to 2 that brought the tax levy increase down from 5% to 3%. Mayor Derek Woellner explains where the new budget came from to get the increase down to his desired goal of 3%.
“The finance director came up with a better proposal. And she took it to the personnel and finance committee and they recommend that it come to the meeting tonight. I’m very happy that we met the 3% goal. It’s not a whole lot, I think we’re only saving people around $10 a year, but it’s something.”
Cuts for the budget primarily came from the operations portion. The new budget saves the city $7,700 in operations, with the biggest cuts coming from marketing and street decorations. Along with operations cuts, the city will be investing their undesignated general fund to early debt payoffs from a 2004 structure trade finance.
With several cuts being made, Mayor Woellner says the city has to be especially careful about department spending. “Essentially we’ve got to really watch our department budgets because the money that we have set aside to take on any emergency items, we’re paying off debt early with.”
During the meeting, several members of the public came forward to speak about the city’s budget. Commentors seemed evenly split on wanting a higher or lower tax increase for the city. Woellner says that split is what he had been expecting and hearing from those who reached out to him prior to the meeting.
“Some people want to invest more heavily into the community and get more services to attract people into town. Other people think we’re happy with what we’ve got let’s pull back a little. I thought that an increase is totally necessary. You can’t have a zero percent increase every year. The question is where do you find that line and trying to find the middle ground between what everyone wants.”
Mayor Woellner said he set a 3% goal for the tax increase due to cost of living numbers he looked at. “For example, Social Security cost of living increase was 2.8% for 2019. I thought that in order to be less of a burden on people that depend on Social Security as their main source of income, let’s try and be around that number. 4 point one percent seems a little too high when we’re looking at costs of living increase of 2.8. So I wanted to bring it down to 3 and we got there.”
The Mayor also thanked citizens for giving their input on the budget. He felt it was a great example of how representative democracy should work. The new budget saves residents $8 per month from the initial budget proposal and will go into effect at the end of this year.
