Gov. Walker’s budget vetoes earlier this summer have trickled down to local governments, including Juneau. The city and school district are now facing a nearly $5 million deficit for the budget year that began in July, and officials are looking for solutions.
Bob Bartholomew, finance director for City and Borough of Juneau, was preparing Thursday afternoon for the Juneau Assembly’s Finance Committee meeting that would take place later in the evening.
“The meeting tonight for the finance committee is to basically address the deficit that we now have,” he said. “In the schedule you can see it’s about $4.9 million.”
Most of the burden is on the city.
Ideally, the city would pull from its savings, as a one-time fix, Bartholomew said. The city has about $16 million in its reserves.
It’s important to keep the deficit in context, he said.
“Our total budget is $330 million, our general government budget is roughly a $100 million,” he said. “So while $5 million is large, it’s manageable.”
The city passed its budget before the governor’s vetoes, so it couldn’t fully anticipate the cuts. The biggest worry is that the state’s continued budget problems will affect the city for years to come, Bartholomew said.
“If it’s $5 million every year for a number of years, then it’s a much bigger issue and that’s the part where we’re not certain of but we have to prepare that it could be at that level. But I don’t expect it to be that large for a number of years, I think it’s going to be smaller than that.”
The decisions won’t be made immediately, city manager Rorie Watt said, adding that officials want to look at all possible solutions.
“We have savings to weather this storm, and we want to use them the best we can, as we re-calibrate what we do as a local government,” Watt said. “And we don’t need to make a decision this week or this month.”
But the school district’s $500,000 deficit may be harder to tackle.
The school lost funding from the state’s per pupil formula funding and school transportation.
The district told the city last week that it would be able to cover it. But now, school officials say they’d prefer to cover only half.
At the finance committee meeting, Superintendent Mark Miller said while it could pull from its reserve, it would wipe out the district’s savings.
“The flexibility for us to absorb any emergencies that come up using general fund dollars, goes away,” Miller said.
While it can look to the assembly for help, the city has already maxed out what it can give the district under state law.
The finance committee plans to discuss possible solutions at its next meeting, on Sept. 7.
