Just under a $43 million budget has been proposed for the City of Monmouth’s Fiscal Year 2026-2027. With two of the primary funds within the budget being the Water and Sewer Fund and the General Fund, City Administrator Lew Steinbrecher breaks down key elements in next year’s budget:
“We have three major categories that we fund within the General Fund, that would be the police department, the fire department, and municipal operations. The municipal operations includes the street department and then of course all the administrative staff operations inside City Hall as well. Within each of the police and fire department budgets, a vast majority of the funds are for labor costs, salaries, overtime, health benefits, and pensions,” says Steinbrecher.
“We have one million dollars budgeted for improvements at the municipal airport. We have already engaged our engineer to do the engineering services during the construction of the east apron repaving and resealing project. Then we have phase one of repaving Runway 3/21. That will be about a $550,000 project. For that million dollars, the City’s match is only five percent,” Steinbrecher adds.
Steinbrecher informs one of the challenges of the City of Monmouth’s budget is the proposed percentage cut of local government distributive funds in Governor Pritzker’s state budget, which are the shared revenues that the state imposes on income tax, causing the City of Monmouth to lose $180,000 in the General Fund. To offset this loss, Steinbrecher has proposed a one half of one percent increase to the City’s Gas and Electric Utility bills:
“As part of the budget, I had proposed a one half of one percent increase to the City’s Gas and Electric Utility bills. That would raise the rate from 1.75 to 2.25. That would generate about $117,000 per year, which would help offset the loss of money from the local government’s distributive fund. We proposed this by looking at what the impact would be. On the average residential customer, that would have an impact of about $2.24 per month. Some of the larger electric and gas utility users in the community would be generating the majority of those revenues. Those revenues are also needed for the City to recruit a new full-time City Administrator here next year,” Steinbrecher states.
Monmouth City Council did approve the ordinance regarding the increase on the utility tax of the Gas and Electric bills. Next year’s proposed budget will now appear on the April 6th Council Meeting agenda.
