City leaders continue budget reviews for fiscal year 2025
By Cameron Montemayor
City leaders moved one step closer to finalizing the 2024-25 fiscal year budget as discussions continued with a work session on Wednesday at City Hall.
Discussions were largely focused on changes to operating budgets for the city’s Health and Planning and Community Development departments. Additionally, administrative department budgets for mayor and city manager, finance, city clerk, human resources, city attorney and communications were discussed at length.
Overall, the proposed budget for FY25 includes more than $212 million in operating and capital expenditures, $3.3 million less than FY24. Approximately $37.4 million is budgeted for capital improvements.
Leaders of each department provided overviews of achievements and challenges from the past year as well as efforts to achieve strategic goals in the coming fiscal year.
The Health Department has an additional $287,000 budgeted for next fiscal year for a total budget of around $5.2 million. Ongoing maintenance and repairs to the aging Patee Hall facility — which is expected to see Capital Improvements Program repairs in 2026 — were heavily discussed by city council members.
The city has implemented a new budgeting process to ensure budget projections are more in line with past expenditures.
“This year we actually did a much more in-depth process than we’ve done in the past,” City Manager Bryan Carter said. “This year we went through individual lines, individual expenditures to identify where funds are being spent, which categories and objects funds are being spent in.”
St. Joseph is projecting $84.59 million in General Fund revenue for FY2025, which represents an 8.2% increase over the prior year. Budgeted expenditures are projected to increase by 9.3% or $7.07 million to $82.98 million in FY2025.
Planning and Community Development Director Clint Thompson highlighted gains in construction of 36 single-family homes as well as strides with demolition of vacant structures. A little more than $5.5 million is budgeted for the department for FY25, a $249,043 decrease from last year.
Thompson said the city’s rental inspection program is also making headway, a program that keeps properties from deteriorating and improves community appearance.
“That has really gained momentum … we’ve inspected 700 rental units,” Thompson said.
The city is expected to have a notably larger budget surplus from last year that will be carried over into this fiscal year to help cover areas of need, part of which is due to fewer expenditures with fewer employees.
For the first time, city leaders discussed the potential of a new unified development code, a major change that could heavily impact development in St. Joseph.
“We’re doing some initial analysis of whether a unified development code is something that we can pursue because while it produces many benefits, it also produces many challenges,” Carter said. “We have to get there, first of all, which means significant changes in the way that development happens all with the goal of making it easier, making it more cost effective and making it quicker.”
Interim Finance Director Dawn Lanning reported the city has been highly successful in ramping up its collection efforts on utilities, fees and other bills.
Council member Madison Davis commended the finance department’s work in boosting collection policies and efforts.
A key topic of discussion impacting numerous departments is the city’s focus moving forward on managing their inventory of hardware more effectively to ensure they don’t have to replace large numbers of expensive technology at once.
“We haven’t done a great deal of planning out, looking further into the future and identifying what’s going to be needed and exactly when it’s going to be needed. One of our strategic initiatives moving forward is to begin doing that,” Carter said.
Budget discussions for the fire department, police and public works will continue Thursday. Additional budget reviews are set to continue through next week.
