Council to hold off on annexation talks this upcoming fiscal year

Budget talks continued at Tuesday night’s Yuma city council special worksession, including the annexation of Mesa Del Sol and a potential property tax increase.
Jay Simonton, the interim city administrator, led the discussion about the annexations the former city administrator expressed in previous budget meetings could have been added into the budget once the fiscal year was already in motion.
City administrator Jay Simonton suggested to the council to keep the Mesa Del Sol and Far West annexation out of the upcoming fiscal year budget and hold it for the next fiscal year.

“That we will go through the annexation process, have a public hearing and try to gather the signatures this fall and winter when residents are here and then in the springtime when we are putting together our budget for next year we should have a pretty good idea if that annexation is going to go through and then we can put those numbers at the very beginning of the budget, so we don’t have this confusion about what’s going to be in, where are we going to put it, those kinds of things,” explained Simonton.

Council agreed to hold off on the annexation.

Council also picked up on the discussion of taxes and if spikes in property taxes are necessary.
Lisa Marlin, the director of the city’s finance department, presented to council a comparison of sales and property tax rates to surrounding cities and towns.

“If you take a look at that by population, if you compare this you’ll see that we’re right in the middle, explained marlin. “While we do have property tax while some cities and town do not we have a lot less sales tax so we combine those together in the general fund to allow us to operate the general fund.”

Many of the council members addressed their concerns with balancing out the budget with the additional expenses to hit the budget, like the raises hitting first responders and other city employees.
They also asked to see what the budget projections would look like without a proposed property tax increase.

The proposed budget this year would raise property taxes from 2.2747 percent to 2.3185 percent.

However, this will affect each property owner different based on their assessed value, according to Dave Nash, City of Yuma.

The mayor agreed with Miller that he does not want to see property taxes go up and thought Miller’s suggestion would be good to see.

“I’d like to find a way to not have a property tax increase either, but growing communities, growing expenses. As in a growing family. So I think we need to try and figure out the best way forward and I think it would be good to see what that looks like as you suggested.

He then asked to see an example of how the potential spike would affect commercial property. The mayor also highlighted that with the current proposed property tax rate is could affect homeowner with a $200,000 home by an extra $9.
“My concern thinking about this, if we can keep the property taxes flat and then cover everything else, so we would have to close pools and other things in parks and revenue then I’m ok with. If we are going to have to cut services, close pools, and stop doing other things then that’s a serious conversation we need to have,” said council member Edward Thomas.