Newton’s FY2025 Budget

The city council has been working with the city reviewing and preparing the final budget submission for FY2025 for the past several weeks. Links to the full budget, broken out by department (including NPS) can be found on the Friday Packet page of the city’s website.

The very topline of the budget can be summarized in two charts (income sources and appropriations):

We are in the final stages of review, comment and the city council has created multiple resolutions (or recommended edits) All of these can also be found on the Friday packet page.

While many of the resolutions were passed (each requires a majority vote of the council), and sent to the Mayor’s office for review and potential action, there were several concerns raised that will be taken up for more in-depth conversation. These are:

• When talking about staffing increases, changes or increases in staff responsibilities, we acknowledged that more information would be required to reasonably make a request of the city. These changes would effectively become part of the permanent operational budget. This does not diminish the desire for the changes (eg., hiring a Chief Resiliency Officer).

• We acknowledge that although some of these resolutions reflect some of our priorities as a council, not all that require additional funding will be approved (eg., library funding or training for the city council).

• We further acknowledge that there are available funds that the Mayor has at her disposal (eg., yet-to-be-allocated ARPA and free cash).

Additional resolutions are being accepted until the end of this process (which must be completed by May 30th).