The South Milwaukee City Council on Wednesday approved a revised 2021 budget, reflecting a $195,000 reduction in expeneditures from what was passed in November.
The end result: a 0.7% reduction in the city tax levy from 2020, to $11.4 million. The tax rate also decreases to $9.81 per $1,000 in asssessed valuation in 2021. The changes will be reflected in tax bills being mailed in the next couple weeks.
The change was the result of an error in how we calculated our debt. Our staff, through our internal processes, caught the mistake this week, an we immediately brought it to the council’s attention, and sought passage of the revised budget. It passed 7-0.
The reduction in expenditures will be spread across departments, and we have asked our deparment heads to manage any cuts so service delivery is not signifcantly impacted. We also reduced our economic development fun by $25,000 and contingency fund by $10,000 to help fund the reduction.
Mistakes happen, especially during a time when we are being asked to manage a number of generational challenges at once. And the buck stops with me. Thankfully, we caught it, we learned from it, and we are going to take steps to improve our internal processes to ensure we catch issues like this sooner.
You can see the newly passed budget here.
South Milwaukee Blog 