Fort Smith budget review to include non-profit funding amounts

The 2015 budgeting process for the city of Fort Smith is in full swing, with departments making requests for items large and small. Among the budgeting tasks for the city is determining awards of funding for non-profits doing work in Fort Smith.

According to Christy Deuster, administrative coordinator at the city's finance department, a meeting of a subcommittee to award funding was scheduled to have its first meeting Tuesday (Sept. 30) at 1 p.m. to review applications for funding from 13 different non-profits.

In all, Deuster said $162,000 is split evenly between three categories within the outside agency funding — recreational, arts and humanities, and social and community services.

Tuesday's meeting focused on social and community services, where the 13 non-profits seeking funding had requested $150,800 while only $54,000 was allocated for social and community services. Social and community services, Deuster said, emphasizes "life sustaining priorities" such as food, shelter and clothing for the needy. Examples of agencies to have applied for funding include the River Valley Regional Food Bank.

The continued funding of groups outside of Fort Smith city government comes as the city of Fort Smith faces stagnant sales tax revenues and rising costs for line items including employee health insurance and retirement contributions.

According to figures provided by city of Fort Smith Finance Director Kara Bushkuhl, the city's sales taxes (1% for streets and 1% combined for water and sewer projects and fire and parks and recreation) generated $3.27 million in revenue for the August report. The figure is 0.74% above the same month last year, but 1.66% lower than budgeted.

For the first eight months of the year, the total tax collections including the August report from the city's sales tax collections are up 1.37% from the same period last year but off budget by 1.04%.

In spite of stagnant revenues, Bushkuhl has indicated that the city is committed to providing cost of living and possible merit raises in next year's budget. It would be the first in about five years for most city staff. And even with the challenges posed by next year's budget, Dingman said there are no plans to target areas such as the outside agency funding for cuts. The outside agency line item accounts for just shy of 0.34% of the city's overall general fund budget.

"At this point, it hasn't come up as an item to cut in order to accommodate anything else, including salary adjustments," said Deputy City Administrator Jeff Dingman.

Dingman said the administration and finance department were still going through the process of reviewing departmental requests to determine where cuts are possible or necessary in order to balance the city's budget.

Deuster said while the goal is to fund the outside agencies to the full levels just as in years past, there was a possibility of cutting the funding based on budgetary needs within the general fund. Such a scenario has played out in recent years, with funding of $227,000 in requests for Fiscal Year 2009 and dropping the total by 28.63%, or about $65,000, from 2009 to Fiscal Year 2014.

She said agencies are aware that cuts to the budget may occur depending on what the city can afford and what direction the city's Board of Directors provides when budget meetings take place with city directors on Nov. 13 and Nov. 17.

But Dingman said it is entirely possible to fund pay raises and outside agency funding, but in order to do both, departments are going to have to continue working with less.

"The objective will be to try to propose a budget that will include both salary adjustments and maintain the outside agency funding. … We'll look (specifically at) new requests, requests for doing additional programs, requests for additional capital equipment, that sort of thing. Equipment replacement, we're looking at those types of things to see what types of things may be able to be deferred or stretched out or done by a lease purchase agreement or something like that where the operating costs maintain their current levels as much as possible."

But maintaining current levels, he said, could be nearly impossible.

"Even with that, the revenues are projected to remain relatively flat, or essentially flat. From this year's revenues to next year's revenues, I don't think we'll see an increase in revenues. And there will be increased costs, you know? Employee health insurance will have an increased cost, workers compensation insurance may have an increased cost. There's several things like that that just by nature of operating, the costs increase."

Dingman said a final budget would be available to the public for review about a week before formal budget meetings take place with city directors in November.