Council green lights proposed $27.8 million budget

The Maricopa City Council gave thumbs up Friday morning to a proposed $27.8 million budget for the 2012-13 fiscal year beginning July 1 — $1.8 million less than the current year.

“We used the zero-based approach,” City Manager Brenda Fischer said. “But you can never really be zero-based because there are contractual obligations you have to meet, but everything else had to be justified. Our objective was to exceed council’s expectations.”

The city scheduled an all-day retreat at the Copa Center on Honeycutt Road to hash out details in the budget, but the session finished at noon.

Incoming Mayor Christian Price, who takes office on June 5, said he was pleased the current council had “trimmed out the fat.”

He said a lot of the details on the budget had been worked out during a budget and finance subcommittee meeting.

Peggy Chapados, former president of The Villages at Rancho El Dorado HOA, was at the meeting reading through her copy of the documents and jotting notes as members of city staff made presentations to the council.

“This has been scrutinized very carefully,” she said. “They (the city) had a good vetting process this year.”

Anticipated revenues for the city are $27, 906, 917, while planned expenditures are $27,792,450, creating a balance of $114,467. There is a recommended contingency fund of $2 million, an account set aside to handle emergency expenses.

Fischer said the budget includes police dispatch services, which Maricopa now will share with the city of Buckeye, and animal control, which the city contracts with from Pinal County.

She said staff decided not to prefund any grant applications that may require matching funds, waiting instead until the grants are actually approved.

City Finance Director Tom Duensing said there is no plan to raise property taxes, even though municipalities in Arizona are permitted by state statute to raise taxes up to 2 percent per year.

In his presentation, Duensing said anticipated primary property taxes are $10,082,647, personal property taxes are $275,000 and local sales taxes are $6,120,000 for a total of $16,477,647.

For intergovernmental revenues — money collected by the state distributed to cities — the anticipated state sales tax is $3,550,000, the state income tax is $4,441,190 and the vehicle license tax is $1,850,000 for a total of $9,841,190.

Other revenues include licenses and permits, $601,550; fee, fines and charges, $860,770; investment earnings, $110,000; and miscellaneous revenues, $16,360.

The city has set aside $301,000, a little more than 1 percent of the operating budget, to fund several nonprofit grants, including $50,000 for operation of the Rotary Pool and $25,000 for the Maricopa Little League.

Although the F.O.R. Maricopa food bank received a grant for the current fiscal year, it did not apply for a grant in the 2012-13 budget. After some debate, council agreed to add a $50,000 line item to the budget to fund F.O.R.

That was the only addition council members made to the budget. A proposal to give ECO Inc. $60,000 to fund recycling day events was turned down, even after Mayor Anthony Smith underscored the success of the group’s April 21 recycling day, in which about twice as much hazardous waste was collected than at the November recycling day.

In supporting the line item budgeting for F.O.R, Smith said the group could get a $50,000 grant from the Ak-Chin Indian Community and another $50,000 grant from Harrah’s Ak-Chin Casino Resort if the city could match it with $50,000.