GENEVA —
Geneva street superintendent Tim Bittner has spent many hours working on the city’s 1984 one-ton truck.
A workhorse for the city road crew, the old truck has been fixed, maintained and then fixed again and again, but its time is over, Bittner said.
Geneva City Manager Jim Pearson said that while the truck lasted nearly 30 years and the road crew’s mechanics saved the city considerable funds by making repairs in-house, the city simply cannot afford to replace the vehicle.
“This puts light on the fact that we are not able to replace vehicles with the current financial situation that we find ourselves in with the reductions in state funding for local governments,” he said.
Pearson said the city finance committee met in August to discuss infrastructure and capital needs.
“It was the first meeting of many to come,” he said. “We know our capital needs are high and the funding is not there for the streets as we need them and we know we need to do something.”
Pearson said while the city is not in a financial crisis, funding may need to be secured to fend off deficits and allow the city to continue to off a high level of services to residents.
“Every year we lose $400,00 out of budget due to failures in the state’s local government fund,” he said. “Typically, that fund would be our money for capital projects and I don’t think that money is coming back and I think we will struggle. Each month the city sees the results of the state cuts more and more.”
In order to make up for the $400,000 shortfall in state funds, which would only allow the city to break even, voters would have to approve a 4.4-mil levy.
The finance committee, which includes councilmen Howard Anderson, Tim Miller and Michael Keenan, met with Pearson, councilmen Jeffrey Piotrowski, Rodger Fuller, Mike Schupska, Philip Cordova, assistant City Manager Jennifer Brown, Finance Director Juanita Stuetzer. Fire Chief Doug Starkey and water works Superintendent Dave Gilbert for a funding brainstorm following the August election.
Together, the group discussed fees for rental inspections. Geneva’s 40-point rental inspection could cost landlords $100 per year instead of $25 every two years, as proposed by the group.
The city’s debt service, which drops off somewhat in 2014, and 2016 with the repayment of bonds, may help matters somewhat, the group discussed.
Pearson said nothing has been decided, but council and the city’s committees hope open discussion and creative thinking will pay off long-term.
“At this point, we are just making suggestions,” Pearson said. “We are thinking, you know, ‘what is the plan and let’s get a plan together to present to the people.’ We are not in crisis now, we are just entering into conversation to try to find the right direction for the city. We need to identify our funding needs and our priorities.”
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Capital ideas
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