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City Manager Scott Neal made a summary presentation on the budget to the City Council on Tuesday night. It included highlights of the public engagement budget process with the Citizens League, some discussion, and then a unanimous vote to approve it. See this 27-minute video clip excerpt titled: 2012 Tax Levy and Adopting 2012 Operating Budget:
[reposted from my blog here] Rousing success might be a little too enthusiastic, but I think I can say that it went pretty well. In my blog yesterday, I predicted that we’d get to budget around 9 pm and wrap up the meeting around 10 pm. By golly, that wasn’t to far from the actual time frame. We started consideration of the budget around 8:15 pm and wrapped up the meeting at 10:10 pm. Not bad. The Council approved the budget as proposed. I gave a short summary of the budget contents in yesterday’s post, so I won’t get into that again today. Suffice it to say, a post describing the contents of the budget in detail would be unreadable in length. It might not be all that interesting either. We will put final touches on the approved 2012 budget during the last few days of 2011 as we get ready for the year ahead. This is normally a time when workloads wind down a bit, but we’ve got a lot going on right now, so it’s back at it. Edina is no place for slackers. [reposted from my blog here] Tonight is Budget Night. Well, technically, it’s a City Council Meeting night. But for those of us involved in the city government budget making process, tonight is the night when the City Council takes final action on the proposed City budget for 2012-2013. Tonight is the culmination of a long process and a lot hard work. It’s the night where the City Council can come together nicely or break into factions. What will happen tonight? I am not a betting man, but I believe the Edina City Council will end the night coming together rather breaking apart. The budget proposal that I will be making to them tonight is a reasonable one. It grows some services (economic development, facility management and environment protection), but holds most everything else we do at current levels. It places a stronger emphasis on tighter management of our municipal enterprises (golf course, ice arena, art center, aquatic center, liquor store, etc.). It includes additional funding ($700,000) for capital improvements and ($300,000) for technology upgrades. Our Total Tax Levy increase to support all of the above, and much much more, is 1.79% from 2011. This creates an increase in tax burden for the median single family home in Edina of 2.7%, or $28 for the year. I’ve been in the city management business long enough that I know enough not to call that increase low. But, I will call it modest, particularly when the 2011 Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) is currently projected to end 2011 at +3.5%. It’s about 3 hours until the Council meeting starts. I suspect we will be getting to the budget discussion around 9pm. If all goes well, we will have a budget approved and ready to share with the world by 10pm tonight. 1. Citizens League Project Director Stacy Becker has compiled a summary (PDF) from last week’s public participation budget session at the Braemar Golf Course Clubhouse:
2. Results from the online survey that was part of the 43-minute screencast presentation on the budget will be included in the compilation of all the budget sessions that will be presented to the City Council. Some people submitted comments to the open-ended questions on the online survey and those responses are included here:
Edina City Manager Scott Neal and Citizens League Project Director Stacy Becker held the final of 4 public participation budget meetings last night at the Braemar Golf Course Clubhouse. About 20 citizens attended. You can read the summaries from the previous three meetings here. We’ll have a summary from last night’s meeting available soon. If you missed the in-person workshops, you can still participate online:
Here are some additional photos from last night’s meeting:
City Manager Scott Neal is participating and Assistant Finance Director Eric Roggeman is available to answer online questions, too.
Citizens League Project Director Stacy Becker has compiled summaries from the three public participation budget sessions that were held a couple weeks ago.
See the PDFs:
If you missed these, you have two other opportunities: If you were unable to attend one of the live public participation budget sessions and won’t be able to attend the Nov. 29th one, you have one other option:
When? Tuesday, November 29, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. Where? Braemar Golf Course Clubhouse See the live Google map below for directions. There’s an article in this week’s Edina Sun Current titled Building a better budget: Edina, Citizens League gather public input by Katie Mintz:
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A glance at the inner right sidebar here on the 2012 Budget blogsite shows Recent Comments excerpts from the 
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