Mayor presents $617 million preliminary biennial budget

Published 3:01 pm Thursday, October 9, 2014

Redmond Mayor John Marchione presented the 2015-16 preliminary biennial budget at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

The $617 million budget will run from January 2015 through December 2016 and bolster the city’s maintenance efforts, support Redmond to keep up with growth and offer services and investments the community desires.

The budget was developed using the city’s Budgeting By Priorities (BP) process, which builds a budget around the city’s six community priorities: business community, community building, clean and green, infrastructure and growth, responsible government and safety.

Citizens provided input for the budget through an annual community survey, the website tool Your City Your Choice, created in partnership with DigiPen Institute of Technology and a new Civic Budget Team made up of community members.

“Citizen engagement is so important in the budget process because it’s how we are spending citizen dollars to address their key priorities,” said City Council member and Public Administration and Finance Committee chair John Stilin.

He added that the budget is the community’s budget and that as a council member, it is difficult to make decisions for and about the community with silence from the public.

“We couldn’t do it without community input,” Stilin said.

Mike Bailey, financial director for the City of Redmond, said about 1,400 people participated in the community poll on Your City Your Choice. And through this participation, he said the results were a bit unexpected.

Those who participated in the poll were given 12 chips to rank the priorities that were the most important to them — placing more chips under the priorities they care about the most. Through this poll, Bailey said the priority that got the most was clean and green.

“I think the results were surprising to many of us,” he said.

While Bailey stressed that the poll was not scientific, it did give the city a good idea about what is important to the community. As a result, he said, the mayor went back and made changes to the budget to reflect this. Bailey said the percentage of the budget allocated to the clean and green priority remains at 8 percent like the previous budget, but before the poll results, it would have gone down.

Community members can still participate in the Your City Your Choice poll by visiting www.redmond.gov/yourchoice.

The biennial budget is reinforced by a long-range financial strategy and a six-year financial plan that continues Redmond’s progress toward the vision of a community with connected neighborhoods and vibrant urban centers.

Included in the budget are: a new 3 percent utility tax on cable television subscriptions; an $8 increase in business license fees to account for inflation since its last adjustment in 2007 and an additional $7 business license fee increase that recoups revenues from a reduction of impact fees earlier in 2014. The proposed budget also includes modest rate increases in the water and wastewater utilities.

“In order to remain a world-class city, we need to continue to make progress on our community vision and goals,” said Marchione in a press release. “This requires continued investment, bringing forward our best work and building on the momentum we have built over the past six years.”

The press release states that key budget themes include: “catching up” needed investments while maintaining the momentum on the wide variety of community services; “keeping up” on the needs of a growing city and “stepping up” by enhancing cultural offerings and improvements in community transit services.

“This budget retains a commitment to take the big steps only with significant community dialog and input and maintains what makes Redmond special,” Marchione said in the release.

In addition to the feedback already received, the community is encouraged to bring their budget ideas to public hearings being held on Oct. 21 and Nov. 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the City Hall Council Chambers. Council budget hearings can be viewed on RCTV Channel 21 or on the city’s website at www.redmond.gov through the months of October and November. Adoption by the City Council of a final budget is scheduled for Dec. 2.

For more information about the city’s budget, visit www.redmond.gov/budget.