Proposition I passed in Homer's special election, Tuesday – that's according to unofficial results released by the city. City Manager, Katie Koester, is now focused on what’s next.
Homer City Council asked the voters if, for three years, they could suspend three quarters of a percent of city sales tax that usually goes into to the Homer Accelerated Roads and Trails fund, also known as H.A.R.T. And the voters said, Yes. Homer City Manager, Katie Koester says it shows the community was willing to sacrifice to keep the city going.
“Basically it was the community saying that they appreciate the services that the city of Homer provides and showing a commitment to keeping this place running and keeping services available,” said Koester.
Koester says the money that’s already in the fund won’t be touched.
“The Corpus of the fund, which is at about seven million dollars, is not impacted by that vote. So that money is still available to fund construction projects,” said Koester.
The proposition redirects around a million dollars, that would have gone into the roads and trails fund, into the general. City officials say they hope to come up with a new funding strategy over the next three years. The city launched a campaign aimed at getting voters to say ‘yes’ to the proposition. And they had good reasons.
Koester says there are two main reasons the city has an approximately 1.2 Million dollar budget gap this year, the first one is years of not collecting sales tax on non-prepared foods.
“The voters made that decision, the City Council honored that – but that has meant about an $800-thousand dollar decline in revenue over the last four years, said Koester.
The second reason is state budget cuts, due to declining oil revenue.
“We received a cut in our community jail contract of about $365-thousand dollars. In addition revenue sharing was removed from our operating budget given the unstable nature of that as a funding source, so there’s almost $800 thousand dollars in state impact to our budget. And so when you add those two together, you don’t have a lot of room and you had to start looking at cuts and revenue and that’s where the proposal to suspend H.A.R.T came from.”
The city says a total of 588 voters cast ballots in the special election. That’s a 13 percent turnout. Koester says now that Proposition One has passed the Council can move ahead with a budget.
“The budget proposal that I proposed to Council had two budgets, budget A and budget B. And budget A was conditional on the approval of H.A.R.T. The city council still has to pass the final budget,” said Koester.
And that won’t come without some additional sacrifices, says Koester.
“Budget A still contains $725-thousand dollars in cuts, which included six and half full-time equivalents. And also a lot of cuts to operating budgets, you know the money the library has to buy books or someone has to contract for professional services and get things repaired and you know buy supplies, so it’s really a tight budget,” said Koester.
Koester says there will be opportunity for public testimony at the regular City Council meeting on Monday at City Hall, where she expects the election to be certified and a version of the budget to be passed.
