On Monday, September 16th, City Council held a Finance and Budget Committee meeting on the 2025 City Budget. Committee meetings are not recorded.

A reminder, a pre-budget meeting was held on August 12th and you can find the summary here: https://voterunservelivonia.com/2024/08/12/august-12th-2024-finance-and-budget-committee-meeting/

A Public Hearing on the budget will be held on Wednesday, October 2nd at 7pm and you can read the complete agenda packet from the meeting here (including the proposed budget): https://livoniami.portal.civicclerk.com/event/495/files/agenda/2980

The proposed budget is a balanced budget and maintains a fund balance of approximately 24% of total expenditures, this preserves the City’s bond rating.

General fund revenue is $74,966,952 and proposed expenditures are $74,948,184 (public safety is 63% of the expenditures). A majority of the meeting was spent going over the City’s financial state and how the new Finance Director worked with Department Heads to determine priorities. Each Department submits a proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year. A new procedure had each request categorized as essential, important, value ad and desired. Of those categories 99% of essential requests were included, 86% of important requests were included, 21% of value ad requests were included and 15% of desired requests were included in the proposed budget.

The most impactful notes on the budget are the proposed addition of two administrative roles and the savings of $2.4M from retiree health benefit savings that is being put aside for a prospective bond for a new City Hall. The proposed administrative roles are:

Director of Capital Improvement position that would oversee new and reconstruction projects, asset management planning, capital improvement plan (extend it from 6 year to 10 year planning), develop economies of scale in bidding process for cost savings and direct ADA compliance. 

Budget & Fiscal Service Manager position to help with transparency, long-term planning and fiscal projections.