No hike on tax rate: Town council approves budget that address street, safety concerns

After months of planning, two town hall meetings and extensive fine tuning the town of Sunnyvale's budget and tax rate passed unanimously during a special town council session at town hall Monday night.

In a special meeting to make sure the town posts the tax rate in time the Sunnyvale Town council approved a budget and a tax rate that stays at $0.407962 per $100 of valuation. The budget meets several road construction needs of the town and supplies some needed safety equipment to the fire department. The vote was unanimous on both the budget and tax rate.

The proposed general fund revenues for the town of Sunnyvale I $4.67 million which is down 3 percent, an amount of $148,837, from last year's budget. Expenses, also down 3 percent, came out to $4.71 million.

Sunnyvale's debt service rate went up from 0.085 cents to 0.100554 cents. The change here meant less money went into the general fund as the town council wanted to keep the tax rate the same. The general fund rate dropped from 0.32292 cents to 0.307408 cents.

The council had directed the town staff to cut enough from the budget and dipped only slightly into the fund balance so the town will have 134 days of operating funds. This is above the 120 days of operating funds that bond issuers prefer seeing.

Some of the big ticket items that found their way onto this years budget $40,000 to begin an escrow account to build funds for a traffic light, $187,000 for road and street repairs to multiple failing streets and $55,350 for nine self contained breathing apparatuses for the fire department.

Councilmember Ronnie Henderson said with a flat budget and the current economic conditions it was important for the council to get the most out of the budget for the residents.

Town Manager Scott Campbell said the council took some innovative steps in finding ways to meet a majority of the needs the town staff had initially suggested. Four of the five road projects will be funded which was a majority of this year's budget. The East Fork Road project was the one project that will not be funded. Before the budget was finalized Campbell said the council did what it needed to do to make sure the budget met as many needs as possible for the town.

"This is a lean and mean budget, without any fluff to it," Campbell said. "The council did a great job of making sure that happened."

Following in the town safety focus the town council will replace half of the fire departments SCBAs. It would cost $110,000 to replace all of them, so the council is getting 9 of them replaces, half of the units that need to be replaced, as they feel it is better to begin addressing the need now even if more is needed.

"We are going to replace half of the self contained breathing apparatuses," Campbell said. "They were just antiquated and really having them outdated was a safety issue. Some of them were so old they could not even be used for training purposes and the fire department would have to borrow them to train."

Current Rating: 0 of 0 votes!

Rate File: Select Rating: * ** *** ****

 Plano Apartments
 Plano Attorneys
 Plano Auto Dealers
 Plano Auto Parts
 Plano Auto Repair
 Plano Beauty Salons
 Plano Car Rental
 Plano Dentists
 Plano Doctors
 Plano Flowers
 Plano Hotels
 Plano Insurance
 Plano Loans
 Plano Mortgages
 Plano Movers
 Plano Pizza
 Plano Realtors
 Plano Restaurants
 Plano Storage
 Plano Tax Preparation
 Plano Travel
 Featured
 More...