Bloomington City Manager Jeff Jurgens said while the city will likely have to cut about 12 jobs per year for "probably at least the next three or four years" to plug a budget hole, the police and fire departments will not be part of any staff reductions.
“What we have visibility on at this point is about $3.75 million, if everything was an apples-to-apples comparison,” said Jurgens.
The city council has declined to change its $22.3 million tax levy for two years now, even as costs have risen dramatically. Pension costs alone are rising by $1 million, Jurgens said on WGLT's Sound Ideas.
For scale, the entire city budget is more than $300 million, but that includes fee-supported "enterprise funds" such as water and sewer. The general fund is $143 million, and that is where the cuts would take place.
“Our hope is to come forward with a budget that is pretty tight and that will hopefully not be very controversial. We don’t want to look at really impacting the residents with the budget, so we’re going to look at ways to make cuts and to find savings within the budget process,” said Jurgens.
Even with process improvements to increase efficiency, employee attrition will eventually start hurting, said Jurgens.
"We are a growing city in terms of population, in terms of geographical size, and in many ways in terms of complexity. So, we need staff to do a lot of the things that we're doing. We can't expect to just completely cut half our staff," he said.
Such efficiency moves will take time to materialize — through retirements, reassignments, and job changes envisioned by a "workforce sustainability initiative."
Jurgens opposes layoffs. So, the city must take more immediate measures to balance its revenue and expenses in the interim. Jurgens said that will likely mean project delays and other constraints.
“We’re not going to have a lot of room for [new] capital projects,” he said, adding the city also will have to get creative.
“For example, we might look at trying to do our asphalt and concrete differently. Doing how we purchase equipment differently. Maybe we don’t renew our equipment as quickly as we were,” said Jurgens.
He said he doubted the city will return to the practice of leasing equipment.
Jurgens also was unsure whether the fiscal constraints would ignite any city council enthusiasm for creating a 1% municipal grocery sales tax.
"That is certainly something a lot of communities are looking at and is a material number to the city. We anticipate that a full year of that will be about $3 million,” said Jurgens.
The city council will likely vote on a new budget in April.
2024 in review
Jurgens said he’s pleased with the city's progress last year. Bloomington is seeing good results from the reorganization of the economic development department and Jurgens said he hopes for more, noting “2024 really laid the groundwork for a lot of things, and it really is going to, in my mind, bear fruit in 2025.”
Back in August, the city council approved a contract with Iverson Consulting Group as part of its Continuous Improvement Initiative for the city. The plan was to implement two to three changes by the end of the year.
“We renewed that contract into 2025 because we were seeing such good results from that,” said Jurgens, “in terms of efficiency and process improvements.”
Early efforts to address the community housing shortage also are good, he said.
“The downtown TIF is absolutely huge. We had, earlier this week, the announcement about the redevelopment of the old Pantagraph building. That’s going to be a $20-30 million investment in our downtown and I hope that is just the first of many large developments that we see in our downtown in 2025,” said Jurgens.
2025 issues
One challenge is the budget and the second is the sheer number of projects in the pipeline, he said.
“And that’s a good problem to have,” said Jurgens. “We’ve got the streetscape design. That will be ready to bid this year. With the downtown TIF, we have a number of properties I hope to see redeveloped and I hope we start to see those agreements come through in 2025.”
