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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

ResiStat Recap: City Facing $3 Million Budget Gap


With budget deliberations just a few weeks away, departments at City Hall have been submitting their ideal financial requests to the administration which revealed a $3 million gap as the FY2013 budget stands right now. 

Mayor Joe Curtatone, armed with pie charts and graphs, laid out the city’s financial situation to attendees at Monday night’s Ward 5 ResiStat meeting-but did assure that the budgets submitted in for consideration were their ideal budgets and that real focus will be spent to trim them as much as possible. 

Curtatone went on to promise ideas for increased revenue and “efficiencies,” but did not go into specific detail.

The $3 million amount is far cry from last year’s initial projected shortfall of over $7 million. Budget deliberations turned out to be fairly easy with layoffs at Traffic and Parking and proposed revenue streams including increases for residential parking permits, difference licenses through the Clerk’s office, and the initiation of ticketing expired registrations around the city. The expired registration ticketing initiative was slated to make the city almost $1 million alone. The rest of the budget balanced through a withdrawal out of the rainy day fund. As of right now, no budget information can be found on the City’s website for FY2013.

With regard to the School Committee budget, Ward 5 Representative Mark Neidergang invited everyone to Somerville High School on May 23rd at 7pm to participate in a public hearing surrounding the proposed budget for the Somerville Schools. Some budget information has already been posted to the Somerville Schools website with more being included in the upcoming weeks.

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