OSWEGO – At last Monday’s Common Council meeting, Mayor Billy Barlow unveiled his proposed budget for 2022. The budget boasts no tax increases and an increased focus on the marina, parks and other waterfront areas.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the budget is two-fold, as there is no tax increase nor does the budget use city reserves to “balance the budget” as Barlow described. This is important for a variety of reasons, including affordability and maintaining Oswego’s “relatively good shape,” in terms of its finances, according to Barlow.
“Affordability is always key when you are trying to keep residents in the community, or you are trying to attract people to come in from perhaps another municipality.” Barlow said. “At the same time, I think it is equally as important that we don’t do what several of my predecessors have done which is not increase taxes but spend the city reserve funds to offset and pretend you are balancing a budget that you are not.”
Common Council President Rob Corradino also mentioned these aspects of the budget as the two things that really stood out to him, adding that it is “a true zero budget, a 0% increase in taxes without using any type of artificial support from the fund balance.’
This “true zero budget” is something that Barlow’s administration has accomplished across five budgets.
Beyond this, the budget demonstrates the mayor’s priority on the marina, as it saw a substantial 7.9% increase in allocated money from $661,283 to $713,539. This is due to the city’s desire to invest more in Wright’s Landing and parks along the waterfront.
“You are seeing a little bit of investment, but also back to the core message is the marina and the waterfront is a high priority of mine and my administration,” Barlow said. “We also hire more seasonal, mostly college and high school students, in the spring, summer and fall and they take care of the splash pad, the firepit seating area, they tend to boaters and any issues they have … That’s been slowly creeping up for the last few years now and through the remainder of my term, you’ll see some continued investment in the marina, in parks and in the [Department of Public Works] in general.”
Due to this investment and the completion of the Wright’s Landing project, the city anticipates an increase in revenue from the marina as well. This includes $60,000 of new revenue from selling fuel at Wright’s Landing alone. This, combined with other revenue resulted in $414,000 in expected revenue for 2022 from the marina.
While there was a larger focus on the marina, this forced the mayor to move money from other areas to maintain the current tax rates. Barlow, specifically, pulled $25,000 from the tourism fund, reducing the total to $38,500. While this is a decrease over one year, the mayor sees the tourism budget as an overall positive when comparing it to the 2020 budget, which had $8,895.
“My first several budgets had about $40,000 in promotion, tourism and events total. COVID happened in 2020, and we were anticipating wanting to come back strong and people being excited to get out and be active in 2021 post-pandemic,” Barlow said. “That’s why you see we basically doubled that budget to $80,000 in 2021. In 2022, I scaled it back to $60,000, which in my mind is still $20,000 more then we historically did.”
He went on to add that he noted to the Common Council that if it could find $20,000 in cuts, he would love to “restore” the tourism budget.
Another significant change in the budget was the “debt service” item, which more than doubled to $1,604,500. This was because the city had to front funding for major projects. Once they were completed, the state reimburses the city in the form of grant money.
“We had to take some short-term notes to bridge that money to get the projects done,” Barlow said, “Then a big bulk of that increase is a five-year capital plan that we adopted in 2016 and 2017 with a bunch of projects that we completed, but that ban is out.
Corradino added that all municipalities must have and pay back debt to “keep bond ratings at a high level.”
Moving forward with the proposed budget, the council took this past week to review the budget and ask department heads any questions it had. On Monday, August 30 the Common Council will hold a budget workshop with the three biggest departments in terms of funding, the police department, fire department and department of public works to further review the budget.
“Once we go through discussing it with those three department heads at the workshop, councilors will have the opportunity [to discuss] any proposed changes or amendments a councilor has at that point, and we’ll be voting on whether we make any changes or not,” Corradino said. “The city chamberlain will be sitting with us … She has her computer with her and any budget amendments that we’re making to the mayor’s proposed budget, she can immediately tell us by plugging the numbers into her computer whether that increases or decreases the budget and how it affects the tax rate.”
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