Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include budget information from Utica Budget Director Amir Kaltak.
The announcement of an additional $3.7 million in mid-February, after Mayor Michael Galime had presented his proposed fiscal year 2026-2027 budget, had a big impact on the city’s budget.
There will be no tax increase and the budget does not take money from the city’s fund balance as it has done heavily for the past two years, Budget Director Amir Kaltak said. It does include a reserve draw of $700,000 tied to certain infrastructure-related projects, he said.
The mayor’s proposed $93.3 million budget had included a 2.9% tax rate increase to bring in an extra $1.9 million and a $2,150,000 transfer from the fund balance.
The final $94 million budget represents an increase of $2.4 million, Kaltak said. In presenting his proposed budget, Galime said that the city’s cost for mandated expenses would go up $2 million in the next fiscal year.
Both the increase in state aid and the implementation of a hotel bed tax helped to fund the budget without a tax increase or fund balance transfer, Kaltak said.
The aid increase was through the state’s Temporary Municipal Assistance program; when the proposed budget as written, the city had only expected $1.9 million through the state’s Aid and Incentives for Municipalities, or AIM, program.
The happy news didn’t lead to a peaceful budget process, though, as the Common Council majority, and the mayor and council minority disagreed over how much the city can afford to spend on paving, and whether padding certain line items was “overbudgeting” or simply prudence.
The Common Council passed a budget on March 19 — with a 6-3 vote divided along party lines — that included 14 budget amendments, five of them passed unanimously at the mayor’s request.
Republicans Samantha Colisimo-Testa, Joseph Betrus Jr. and Frank Carcone voted no on the budget as well as several of the amendments. The council’s majority includes Katie Aiello, Robert Burmaster, Joseph Betar, Venice Ervin, Heather Wasielewski and Jack LoMedico.
But Galime then vetoed seven of the amendments, all of which Common Council overrode on March 25, each with a 6-2, party-line vote. Carcone was absent.
The largest of those amendments added $500,000 to the $6.4 million Galime’s budget had earmarked for paving work. The majority council members had wanted to add $1 million for more paving originally, but cut it back to $500,000 given some proposed cuts they chose to give up after hearing from the mayor.
The other six vetoed amendments that were later overridden cut $262,000 from the budget to allow the city to hold taxes steady and still pay for the extra $500,000 in paving. Other cuts were made when the budget passed that the mayor did not veto.
The $262,000 in cuts came from budget lines for street lighting, infrastructure, engineering contracts and consulting services. The council majority provided a rationale for each cut, justifying most by saying that the amount in the mayor’s budget exceeded average annual spending for a budget line, that the money had not been spent in the current budget or that the department had been given more money than it asked for.
Galime’s written explanations of his vetoes explained how some seemingly underused budget lines would be spent by the end of the fiscal year and that there is good reason to expect an increase in other budget lines next year (such as electricity for streetlights, given rising utility costs across the state). He also argued that a number of the amendments would force the city to put off necessary infrastructure repairs.
He also argued for a cautious budget. The council majority called certain line items “overbudgeted,” because the city has never spent as much on them as was initially budgeted. But Galime argued that those lines represent prudence, a move to leave some wiggle room in the budget for unexpected expenses or expense increases.
The city is negotiating with the police and fire unions, and if those contracts are both settled within the next fiscal year, the city will have a $1.8 million budget gap, Galime wrote in a general letter explaining his overall objections to the amendments he vetoed. His budget left money for contingencies, but the final budget does not leave enough, he argued.
This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Utica budget, amendments split mayor, Common Council by party
Reporting by Amy Neff Roth, Utica Observer Dispatch / Observer-Dispatch
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