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Mostly Cloudy City budget includes small tax cut
Average home would save $27 under proposed $84M plan
The city on Tuesday floated its proposed $84.4 million budget for fiscal 2014-15, which includes a 1 percent tax cut for homeowners, after state lawmakers approved a bill earlier this year allowing the city to issue millions of dollars in serial bonds to pay down the remainder of a deficit from 2011-12.
While the proposed spending plan includes a number of cost-saving measures and is the administration’s third consecutive balanced budget — and the second that is within the state tax cap — it also includes a number of salary increases, mainly due to the city’s contractual obligations with the Civil Service Employees Association and the Long Beach Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.
Last year’s $83.4 million budget raised taxes by 1.5 percent, but City Manager Jack Schnirman said that this year’s spending plan would reduce taxes on the average home by $27, to $2,876.
Schnirman said that the city managed to cut taxes — despite steep increases in mandated costs such as state pension and health care contributions, and increases for the PBA and CSEA — thanks to a $12 million borrowing measure signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in February to help Long Beach cover Hurricane Sandy costs and the remainder of a $14 million deficit left over from the previous administration that led officials to declare a fiscal crisis two years ago. The bill, Schnirman said, will allow the city to eliminate a three-year deficit surcharge that appeared on residents’ tax bills in 2012.
“The remaining deficit will now be financed over a period of 10 years through state deficit financing — the state comptroller’s office has already come and worked to certify the city’s 2011-12 inherited deficit,” Schnirman explained. “As a result, we get to provide some tax relief by removing the inherited deficit surcharge one year early.”
He added that the value of the bonds has yet to be determined, but it is unlikely that the measure would be used for costs associated with Sandy that are not covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
