CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Charleston Mayor Amy Goodwin and her administration put forward a $98.9 million budget Monday, aimed at addressing a $3 million deficit through spending cuts.
The presentation during the Charleston City Council Finance Committee meeting Monday was with a constant theme from Goodwin: living within the city’s means.
“This is going to be a tough budget year for us, make no mistake,” she said.
The budget proposal does not use any one-time monies, instead relying on cuts to existing city programs and operations.
City officials worked for more than three weeks on preparing the budget.
Charleston city manager Jonathan Storage said the first step in the drafting process was addressing departmental expenses, which he described as “low-hanging fruit.”
“Having a department that had $10,000 in travel expenses but only used $1,000 of it time and time again was an easy cut. That freed up money almost immediately,” he said.
funding for the city’s trash and recycling bag voucher program is cut in Goodwin’s budget. Storage said the $400,000 move makes sense in light of last year’s refuse fee increase and after the discovery of 320,000 unused trash bags.
“Until those get depleted, people will still have access to them,” he said. “We’ll be trying to dole those out on a fair and equitable basis, taking care of those people who need them on a financial basis as opposed to anyone showing up saying, ‘Give me free trash bags.'”
The city’s Environmental and Recycling Committee will be responsible for establishing criteria for future bag distribution.
Additional cuts include reducing most department overtime amounts, reducing senior staff salaries and cutting 21 positions, in which 11 are or will be vacant. The other 10 positions, Storage said, caused redundancies between departments.
“In order to be a balanced approach to where no one part of the budget was over-reduced, we had to look at personal services,” he said. “Mostly because that represented before we started to make our adjustments about 71 percent of the total budget.”
Increases noted in the presentation included a $225,000 increase in building renovation and demolition and doubling the city’s paving budget to $3 million. No cuts to the police and fire departments are part of the budget.
Finance Committee members will meet Monday and Tuesday next week to discuss the budget’s details. A vote on the budget by the committee and the full council is expected on March 18.