Teresi to Present 2015 City Budget Wednesday Afternoon

Jamestown Mayor Sam Teresi

JAMESTOWN – Mayor Sam Teresi is set to deliver his executive budget for fiscal year 2015 during a presentation scheduled for this afternoon in city hall.

Under city law, the mayor is required to deliver his executive budget to the city council on our before Oct. 8 of each year. The council will then review the spending plan, amend it as needed, and approve it prior to Dec. 1.

While the mayor has not delivered any specific details of the 2015 budget, he has talked about some of the challenges he’s encountered while preparing the spending plan.

Last week Teresi was a guest on WRFA’s Community Matters Program and explained that this was going to be another tough budget year.

“This is my 15th budget that I’ve released as mayor of the city of Jamestown and one thing I can say – and I say it every year – is that it doesn’t get any easier,” Teresi told WRFA. “This year has probably been the most challenging of the budgets because we’ve done lot in the past but for everything that we’ve done there’s one less rabbit to pull out of the hat and also the challenges continue to mount and the resources that are made available to local governments continue to dissolve away or diminish in scope.”

For this year’s budget, the city used a Board of Public Utilities dividend payment totaling $475,000 to help balance spending. Teresi will not say if he plans to use any BPU dividends again for the 2015 budget, but does say that all options will remain on the table.

“We’ve got to get into the 21st century,” Teresi explained.  “There has to be less of an emphasis and reliance on property taxes, particularly if want property taxes to be reduced because they are so onerous and so ugly to outside investors that we are trying to attract and bring into the area; which means that there needs to be some other options available to local goverment. we can’t cut our way out of this problem, and that means being able to develop some other resources.”

The current year’s budget totaled $33.5 million and contained a 1.9 percent tax increase.

Teresi’s budget presentation will take place at 4 p.m. this afternoon on the 4^th floor of city hall, with copies of the budget being available in the city clerks’ office following the presentation.