City Manager James Mills projects a budget surplus for Cookeville in the new fiscal year as the process approaches.
Mills said the city recently completed several weeks of meetings with individual department heads to evaluate specific needs and capital requirements for the municipality as a whole. Mills said the local government maintains a consistent policy of fiscal caution to ensure the city remains in a strong financial position at the end of every year.
“We believe it’s going to be a good budget year,” Mills said. “Revenues are steady, property tax revenues are steady, sales tax was pretty much level for the first part of the fiscal year, but in the last few months it’s had a significant uptick. So we are looking at, we hope to be a positive year.”
Mills said the city intentionally underestimates most revenue streams while overestimating the anticipated costs of various projects to ensure sufficient funding is available for completion.
“That way we end up hopefully having more revenue than we do expenditure, so we want to be good stewards of the city taxpayer dollars and so again we just approach it conservatively,” Mills said. “We underestimate for the most part revenues and then overestimate expenses for projects so that we hopefully have enough money to complete those.”
Mills said the city is currently seeing steady property tax collections and a recent significant increase in sales tax revenue following a level period during the first half of the fiscal year. Mills said every proposed project undergoes a cost-benefit evaluation to ensure the work is necessary for the city.
“Our goal is to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars,” Mills said. “We want to make sure we get a good bang for our buck and everything we complete is something that’s needed for the city. We try to evaluate each project to make sure that the cost-benefit is there.”
Mills said the administration relies on feedback from residents and public input gathered by the city council to gauge the effectiveness of its fiscal management. Mills said the city expects a positive budget year based on the current upward trend in local tax collections.
“Well, I think we’re doing a pretty good job,” Mills said. “I mean, we let the residents let us know, the citizens let us know, but we try to gather public input and the council I know has their ear out to hear what the public thinks, but in my opinion, I think we’re doing a pretty good job.”
Mills said the city council will hold public meetings during the second week of May to conduct a detailed review of the budget proposal. The council is expected to consider the budget for formal adoption over two readings during its scheduled meetings in June.