City considers $103M budget — to start

Department heads, council working on spending plan; Gov. Little drops in

The endless merry-go-round of crafting a city budget made another spin Monday, as department heads from Coeur d’Alene came before staff and city councilmembers to work on their budgets for the next fiscal year.

“It’s basically a goal-setting and goal-sharing session, and it’s a great way for council to hear some information about each department,” city administrator Troy Tymesen said before the afternoon meeting.

The short-term plan is working with a $103,916,000 preliminary budget window, one that will be adjusted and narrowed in the months to come as council gives its guidance over which projects could be tabled, expanded, trimmed or eliminated.

For upwards of four hours, department heads congregated in the new socially-distancing seating of the library’s community room, listening as — one-by-one — each presented their departments’ financial outlooks for the year ahead.

Coeur d’Alene was treated to both a financial and in-person surprise shortly after 3 p.m., when Gov. Brad Little made an appearance. Little, who was in Coeur d’Alene to outreach amid both the pandemic and heightened civil unrest, praised City Hall for the arduous work ahead in their budget process while promoting a new $200 million measure to give property owners tax relief.

“I know that Kootenai County and Coeur d’Alene are kind of ground zero for property taxes,” Little told The Press. “We thought, ‘What better place than to come up here and talk about it?’”

The plan will cover 103 percent of public safety salary costs in Idaho cities and counties, so long as their budgets for those salaries don’t pull from property taxes. Funding comes from the $1.25 billion in federal CARES Act relief handed down to states in late March. It’s a plan, Little said, designed to help alleviate the burden of property owners across the state.

“Right now, there are so many people who’ve been hurt by either a slowdown or a shutdown of their business, or they’ve been laid off,” Little said. “One of the most critical things we can do is give them some property tax relief. This won’t solve the problem, but I think the numbers are kind of where people want to see it...and it’ll give the Legislature some breathing room to come up with a more long-term fix.”

Little’s plan was not the only mention of COVID-19 to stamp itself into the afternoon conversation. Tymesen said the pandemic that has decimated public health systems and wreaked economic havoc on countries around the world was the number one calamity hurting the city’s coming budget.

He expects the biggest impact on next year’s plan will be in gas tax revenue, he said.

“That’s the one we’re looking at. Looking into the future, we predicted $2.3 million in highway user tax; now that estimate’s just under $2 million.”