Village sets annual budget hearing for Monday night
By Kellen Olshefski
Staff Writer
The Village of Walworth is aiming to maintain fiscal responsibility with its proposed 2014 budget – which would levy $1.33 million on village taxpayers – by continuing to pay down debt and focus on minor projects rather than major initiatives.
The proposed budget will be presented during a Nov. 18 public budget hearing.
The tax levy will increase by approximately $3,350 from last year. In addition, the budget prepared by village administration lists estimated expenditures for the upcoming year at about $2.2 million.
According to Village Treasurer Donna Schut, the estimated mill rate is set at $6.82 per $1,000 of property value. While this is based on assessed value and will change based on what the actual equalized value is, Schut said it won’t change much once tax bills come out.
Village President Dave Rasmussen said the board wasn’t focused on any major initiatives for the upcoming year while working on the budget, though it is keeping its eyes on several things in the upcoming years.
“No new fire trucks, no major new buildings,” he said. “I mean, we have the library to think about in the future, but it’s more paying attention to where our revenue sources are.”
According to Rasmussen, the board would like to do more streets in the future as well as rehabilitating another one of its municipal water wells.
After increasing the well in Devils Lane Park’s pumping abilities by approximately 120 gallons per minute, Rasmussen said, according to the crew who did the work, it makes it one of the five best wells in the state of Wisconsin.
“When you turn the pump on, the water level doesn’t drop in the casing,” he said. “We want to do another well like that.”
With $225,000 in back collections from the police department, Rasmussen said three-quarters of that revenue would allow for a major road project.
“We could do a major road project and clean something up, and that would be nice,” he said. “Things are a little tighter so we really have to be a little cautious.”
According to Rasmussen, with the village having some bad roads, the board is looking to spend approximately $80,000 on repaving some streets in 2014.
“We’re going after a few of them and we need to go after a few more, but we’re still paying for Beloit Street,” he said.
With payments being completed in the future, Rasmussen said it will free the village up to do a little more and take on projects like Lakeview Drive, and Reid and Adeline streets.
In the meantime, Rasmussen said, the board’s time is spent looking at sources of revenue to ensure the village’s income stream is secure for future years.
“You can go in and say we want to do this and we want to do that, and the question comes back, how do you pay for it,” he said.
“You’re a lot better off if you know what’s available, you’ll know in advance if you can pay for anything.”
While Rasmussen said the board will be focusing on getting expenditures straight next year, there’s a lot of items that offset each other.
“There aren’t any great new revenue streams so there aren’t any new expenditures, we can’t do any giant tax relief or anything like that,” he said.
“We’re fortunate right now that when times were good we fixed everything and we didn’t embark on a lot of huge projects. We don’t have a lot of debt, we’re paying off what we’ve got and quietly going ahead.”
In addition, Rasmussen noted, there’s a minor increase in the water bill of somewhere right around 1 percent overall that will help keep the water and sewer department “flowing along OK too.”
