Budget gap reaches 100 grand

July’s Kyle sales tax receipts fell below projections for the third straight month, increasing the FY 2015-16 budget gap to $117,846 and undoubtedly causing severe scratching of heads and furrowing of brows at City Hall where the staff is trying to find ways to fund much-needed wastewater upgrades and equipment purchases in the proposed budget for the next fiscal year that City Manager Scott Sellers will be presenting to the city council in less than a month.

The good news is that jobs, known in government parlance as FTEs (Full Time Equivalents), that were included in this year’s budget that can’t or won’t be filled, will compensate for the $117,000. And even if those people are hired, they will only count one-sixth of their budgeted amounts. For instance, if six persons are hired to fill six FTEs, budgeted for $30,000 each, they would only receive about two months salary, or $5,000 each, thus reducing this year’s budget by a total of $150,000, more than enough to compensate for the shortfall. Of course, the other side of that coin is those FTEs are on the budget for the full $180,000 in the upcoming budget. I know, it all sounds a little like the NBA salary cap, and, in its own way, it is like that.

City planners forecasted receiving $526,896 in sales taxes this month, but only netted $508,766.51, or 3.81 percent below expectations.

As far as I can figure, the current fiscal year’s budget forecast robust sales tax increases of 18.55 percent over what they were last year. It’s difficult to figure accurately however, because the some of the columns in the latest tables don’t add up. For example, it appears the number ($2,668,489.05) listed as the total in the column labeled "Actual Receipts Last Year FY2015" is about 50 percent of the figure ($4,185,814.01) I get when I add all those numbers in that column.

Be that as it may, I’m betting that 18.55 percent number is going to be a somewhat smaller in the budget proposed next month, probably in the neighborhood of 16 percent. That of course means less money to play with at a time when the city’s needs are rapidly expanding. And I’m betting, after what happened with this year’s budget, the city council doesn’t want to venture anywhere within a nuclear blast’s radius of another property tax increase. Of course, the next city council election won’t take place until two months after the adoption of the FY 2017-18 budget, but voters are known to have long memories when it comes to matters like this.