BRENHAM’S BUDGET FORECAST LOOKING BRIGHTER HEADING INTO NEW FISCAL YEAR
As the City of Brenham transitions into the 2020-21 Fiscal Year, numbers rounding out the current year look to be decidedly more encouraging than previously projected.
After anticipating a revenue shortfall of approximately $1 million earlier this year, City Manager James Fisher informed the Brenham City Council at a budget workshop this (Thursday) afternoon that the shortfall for the 2019-20 Fiscal Year has dropped to $600,000.
Fisher attributed the improved outlook to better-than-expected sales taxes due to citizens shopping locally, spending more money online, and investing in their properties through home improvement projects. The reopening of several city facilities has also generated revenue, although not at pre-COVID-19 levels.
Fisher said the steps the city took early on in the pandemic put it in a much better financial position moving forward.
Another contributing factor to the city’s improved financial status was reduced expenses, with the city saving $1.2 million through normal personnel attrition and other actions such as a hiring freeze, one-week employee furloughs, reduced part-time positions, travel bans for conferences, and vehicle replacement deferrals. These, along with savings from reduced costs from limited hours of city services, have led to a budget surplus of approximately $600,000.
Fisher said employees taking unpaid time off significantly helped the city, and as a result, the city intends to pay back employees for the time they took off. He said the city would grant that time back as vacation and offer a buy-back option to make them financially whole. If all employees exercised this option, it would reduce the surplus by approximately $175,000. He said the city plans to announce this for employees on September 15th, while also saying the city is considering adding December 31st as an extra holiday.
Fisher said while some may think the city was overly cautious in its COVID-19 response, he believes this was the right approach.
Moving into the new fiscal year, Fisher said the budget for 2020-21 will not require the use of $361,690 in reserves as initially expected, and will be balanced at $68.4 million without the use of reserves. This will be done using personnel attrition, slowly filling positions accounted for in the budget and utilizing the savings along the way to fill the gap.