Borough budget stays steady

PALMER — Having arrived at the start of budget season, the Mat-Su Borough is so far proposing very little, if any, change over last year.

Here are the numbers from the budget as the borough’s acting manager, Elizabeth Gray, presented it this past week:

• The budget for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, totals $379 million, a figure that includes state and federal money flowing into the borough.

• The school district would receive $281 million.

• That translates to an areawide tax rate of 10.063 mills. Areawide taxes pay for things like emergency medical services that all borough residents use. One mill is equal to $1 per $1,000 of a assessed property value.

• The non-areawide mill rate — taxes that pays for things not all residents have access to, like borough animal control — is proposed at .418.

• The areawide tax would go up by .107 mills over last year. That bump comes from bonds voters approved last year. The bump to the non-areawide tax is much smaller at .02.

• The budget adds no new borough staff positions except for 12 hours to a position at the animal shelter, bumping it up to 32 hours per week.

• Around $46.3 million of the budget goes to fund borough operations. Some of the additional money goes to pay debt on borough bonds, but the lion’s share goes to schools.

Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss talked about the tax rate in his weekly podcast.

“We are looking at an areawide mill levy which is larger than last year, which wasn’t like I was hoping for,” he said.

Assemblyman Jim Colver said he’d like to see those numbers hold or decrease. But that doesn’t mean the final budget will look the same when the assembly is done with it.

“I would say it may be trimmed some, added to in some places, but in the end we’re going to end up with less than the manager brought it in at,” he said.

He said property tax income is projected to stay largely the same. Any growth in that revenue tends to come from new construction, and this year there’s little — if any — of that going on.

“Pretty much what I kept hearing from the private sector out and about was that it’s flat as a pancake,” Colver said. “There was a lot of demand in the $200,000 range for first-time homebuyers. That made that market move a little bit.”

Anyone looking for big projects in the budget will be disappointed. The borough usually does things like buy equipment and build buildings with state money. Where new programs and buildings are concerned, Colver said the assembly has told the school district to try and seek that money from the state.

“I don’t think the borough is in a position to give more than we did last year,” he said. “An increase in taxes is not on the horizon for schools.”

And the state has already talked about upping certain parts of what it gives to schools; adding money for vocational-technical education and to offset high energy costs. That money might not be what the district was looking for, but offsetting costs there frees money up elsewhere.

There are exceptions to the rule that the borough doesn’t spend a lot of its own money on infrastructure. The budget contains $750,000 for the Hatcher Pass Ski Area development. There’s also $100,000 for a new Zamboni at the Brett Memorial Ice Arena as well as various upgrades and replacements to borough equipment and infrastructure.

Another exception is with the fire departments. Fire departments are kind of a separate case, though. Money for them comes from fire service areas, which means fire service taxes in the Butte pay for Butte equipment and in Wasilla for Central Mat-Su Fire Department equipment. A similar thing happens on a smaller scale with road service areas.

Colver said he’s eyeing those budgets as well.

“Some of those service areas are generating a lot of cash and then setting it aside in a reserve and building their fire stations or (buying) fire trucks,” which is fine so far as it goes, Colver said; it’s an essential service. But “it hits the pocketbook. It can be as much as a third of somebody’s tax bill.”

He’s not really sure how to pull those costs down.

“We’re looking for some solutions there, so stay tuned, I might come up with something,” Colver said.

All of these things are ideas yet to be seriously discussed. The borough assembly has scheduled a series of budget meetings. First off are public hearings, at 6 p.m., May 4 and 5 at the big fire station in downtown Wasilla at the corner of Swanson Avenue and Lucille Street.

DeVilbiss said in his podcast that he doesn’t expect those hearings to be full of people asking for cuts.

“We normally get a lot more people that are interested in raising the mill levy so their own special project can get done,” he said.

The assembly digs into the budget at 6 p.m., May 10 and 12 in assembly chambers.

Both Colver and DeVilbiss noted the work of lowering the tax rate has already begun with $2 million in federal stimulus money. The assembly decided to apply that money to the 2012 budget instead of using it right away, and it will be used to offset personnel costs rather than pay for anything new.

“We wanted to make sure it would go to reducing the mill rate,” Colver said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.