Monmouth City Administrator Lew Steinbrecher presented the 19.2 million dollar 2020-2021 budget at the recent City Council meeting. The two largest funds are the general fund at 8.7 million and the water and sewer at 6 million. The budget does contain cost-saving measures to accommodate revenue shortfalls the city has seen, which included a slight increase in the utility tax from 1.25% to 1.75%. Steinbrecher explains the reasoning:
“As part of our property tax levy back in December, we had to reduce the amount of the property tax that goes to support corporate operations or municipal operations, the actual delivery of municipal services, that goes into the general fund by some $21,000 because that money needed to be reallocated because of the ever increasing obligation we have for our police and fire pension funds. Clearly, we had a loss of $21,000. The other thing that we were faced with is that Governor Pritzker has decided to withhold an additional five percent off of the local government distributive funds. This is the sharing of state income taxes back to local use of government, specifically municipalities. We will be losing about $50,000 annually in those state shared income tax revenues,” Steinbrecher says.
The 2020-2021 budget was approved, which begins on May 1st.
