Friday at 10:30 a.m. the mayor, city council members, and the City of Minden’s Treasurer/City Clerk Michael Fluhr met in order to make decisions regarding the cities annual budget. This serves as an opportunity for the city council to review and assess the budget, before approving it later in the year.
During the beginning of the meeting, Fluhr stated one of the main objectives for the meeting being held, and that was to get the deficit of the general fund to zero. “In the general fund, we actually have a deficit of $495,000, the reason for that is that we have revenue coming in that we cannot even touch unless we have infrastructure activities in these specific Tax Increment Financing Districts.” Fluhr continued to say “What I want to see, is that the general fund for government activities is zero. I understand it’s a hard way to do this, but there is a way. We have to go through and decide what we’re going to do. It is possible, you have to be willing to make some changes, and then we’re gonna see what the result is.”
What transpired during the meeting was that the City Council, the Mayor, and the Treasurer looked through the various wish lists the different city department had given them, which contained requests for various things those departments claimed to need in order to operate for the next year. The various heads for the departments were there to make a case for their requests, and then the members of the meeting would make a decision to cut funding, add funding, or leave it as it were.
Pam Bloxom said, “I found it interesting with the wish lists in that it seemed to be very smart on the part of the city as to what was being delayed, even though we all want it now if we don’t have the money we don’t get it now.”
This process ended up going from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., a total of 6 hours. Out of the $495,817 needed to be cut, the city council shaved off $16,192. This means that an additional $479,625 is still remaining to be cut. There was a second part of the budget that the City Council was not able to get to in that meeting, and they will conduct a follow-up meeting on Tuesday at 2 p.m in order to address it.
