Hearings on city’s budget set to begin today

Santa Fe City Manager Brian Snyder will present his spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year on Tuesday as budget hearings get underway.

The hearings, which will be livestreamed on the city’s website and broadcast on SFGOV-TV Comcast Channel 28, will give residents an opportunity to evaluate the city administration’s financial priorities.

Hearings will be held Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at City Hall, 200 Lincoln Ave. Each hearing begins at 9 a.m.

The budget deliberations come a year after the city had to cut services and raise fees to erase a $15 million budget deficit. In addition, the city in 2016 ended years of so-called bridging strategies, such as dipping into reserves, borrowing money from the water division and using bond money to pay for salaries. These tactics masked some of the city’s financial problems.

Budget discussions should be less painful this year. City government expects to end this fiscal year with higher-than-projected gross receipts tax revenues and expenses under budget.

“In three years of hard work, we went from a $15 million deficit to an anticipated revenue surplus of over $4.5 million,” Mayor Javier Gonzales said last month during his annual State of the City address.

Gonzales has proposed an acrossthe-board 5 percent pay raise for all city employees at a cost of about $4 million annually.

But it’s unclear whether the proposed 5 percent raise will be part of the city manager’s budget proposal. Snyder’s administration last week said the city manager’s proposed budget would be online Monday. But as of 4:30 p.m., the

spending plan still wasn’t posted.

Tuesday’s hearing will start with opening remarks by Councilor Carmichael Dominguez, who chairs the Finance Committee.

City employee unions will have the floor afterward, and will likely advocate for a 5 percent pay raise. Then Snyder will present his proposed budget.

Department directors will begin to present their individual spending plans at 1:30 p.m., starting with the city manager, deputy city manager and city attorney.