San Luis budget includes funds for road work, raises
SAN LUIS, Ariz. — Motorists and municipal employees are among the beneficiaries in this city’s budget for the new fiscal year that starts Monday.
The nearly $74 million budget, given preliminary approval by the San Luis City Council recently, includes funding for road improvement projects and to implement the second phase in a multi-year program to boost employee pay.
But Mayor Gerardo Sanchez described the spending plan as conservative.
“No large projects of more than a million dollars will be done — we can’t,” he said. “Those projects will have to wait because we have to be more conservative in expenses. We’re going to do it because we don’t know what our revenues will be during the year.”
Last month, voters overwhelming rejected a ballot measure that would have established the city’s first ever property tax. Sanchez and the city council had endorsed the property tax, saying the additional money was needed to provide public services at a time when revenues from the city’s main source, the sates tax, were leveling off or falling.
Street projects funded in the budget include traffic light installation and other intersection improvements on Cesar Chavez Boulevard at the crossings of 10 and 4th avenues.
Also the city plans to upgrade the intersection at 4th Avenue and Union as part of a project to pave access roads to two elementary schools in San Luis.
The estimated costs of those projects are almost $500,000 for the work on Cesar Chavez and nearly another $900,000 for the school access project.
Also in the budget are nearly $500,000 for a storm water drainage system to serve a hotel and commercial complex planned at Main and County 22nd streets. City officials have been in talks in recent months with investors to build the project to San Luis.
Also budgeted are funds for design work for a paving of County 24th Street, a connector road between the city’s east and west sides, as well as for design of a 40acre regional park the city wants to develop at an indefinite time the future. City officials had proposed paying for the park with funding from the property tax that was later defeated by voters.
Fiscal 2019-20 is the second year in a multi-year plan by the city to raise worker pay levels to make them more competitive.
The budget still requires a vote of final approval by the council.