Rising personnel costs, library funding emerge as Palmer budget concerns

PALMER — At its Nov. 8 meeting, Palmer City Council heard a final batch of presentations from groups on their portion of the budget. A familiar pattern emerged: rising health insurance and retirement costs for city employees continue to raise the cost of government.

“As these costs go up, we adjust accordingly based off our revenues,” councilmember Richard Best said. But he doesn’t foresee a raise in the mill rate or fees anytime soon. Setting the 2017 Palmer fee and fine schedules is next on the agenda for the council.

“Palmer generally runs a very frugal budget, and I’m proud of that,” Best said. “It’s pretty much a flat budget this year. But there are always opportunities for us to do better, and we’ve been having those dicussions.”

It’s unknown yet whether the PFD cut has had an impact on sales tax revenues, since those numbers won’t be out until early January. But Best said he has heard from some local businesses they took a hit.

Best said the success of local businesses translates to higher sales tax revenues for the city, and that the council generally prefers to “take the approach of allowing businesses to do business, so it increases our overall budget numbers.”

The new Fred Meyer’s and a new medical facility under construction, for example, along with a small handful of new small businesses entering the local market, are anticipated to boost city revenues, Best said.

But one item of concern is the potential impact that trickle-down budget cuts could have on an institution that’s been threatened before: the Palmer Public Library.

Currently, more than 80 percent of the library’s patrons are residents living outside Palmer City limits. Best said he’d like to educate more of the Mat-Su public on the services the Palmer library provides to the wider borough, and raise awareness of what he said is the importance of funding a library that serves many people including some who don’t have a nearby alternative public library to run to.

Butte residents do pay a tax that supports their library use, hesaid, but that’s not true of other Mat-Su area patrons outside of Palmer.

He said he also appreciates that people coming in to use the library end up spending money at local businesses.

“We don’t want to get into a situation where City of Palmer is IDing people, and if they’re not city residents, that we’re denying them service,” he said.

The city council has until mid-December to finalize a budget for 2017. The next meeting, on Nov. 22, is scheduled to address capital improvements, and fee and fine schedules for 2017.