WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — Budget season is beginning for the City of Wausau. Wednesday night the Finance Committee for the city of Wausau held it’s first workshop for the 2019 budget. The hour-long meeting consisted of city Finance Director Maryanne Groat presenting the changes in the budget from 2018 to 2019. The budget is a cost to continue budget that continues to provide the same services as the previous year.
Groat explains the main change Wausau taxpayers will see in the 2019 budget. “The state of Wisconsin eliminated part of our tax base by exempting it for some commercial properties and replace that with state aid. The budget today is expected to have a twenty-six and a half-cent increase in the tax rates.”
A second workshop for the Finance Committee will be held on Thursday night, which involves city department heads. Groat describes what the department heads will be doing in the second workshop. “There are requests that department heads have that they would like to either expand services or improve processes in their departments, increase staffing. So those will be contemplated by the finance committee.”
Groat also explains how the finance committee members will handle these requests after they are presented on Thursday evening. “They’ll [the committee] rank those. And we’ll review the rankings next week.”
The finance committee will work for the next two weeks on fitting department requests into the 2019 budget. The next time the budget will be discussed will be during a public hearing the first week of November. Then the 2019 budget won’t be finalized until the week of Thanksgiving.
