The Rapid City Council passed a $160 million operating budget for 2017. Residents can expect property taxes to remain the same.
Mayor Steve Allender says he took a different approach to crafting next year’s city budget.
Priority based budgeting is how Rapid City Mayor Steve Allender describes the months long budgeting process for 2017.
Allender says the new approach takes a look at city services and prioritizing them into four categories of importance. He says that visual, based on a scoring system, peer review, and help from a Denver firm will help his office determine where city money should go in the future.
“Instead of saying ‘We’re broke,’ because we’re not broke, $160 million does not equate to being broke, that equates to being well funded," Allender says. "What we will say is ‘we have too much funding in the fourth quartile, the third quartile, maybe a little in the second quartile, and it’s time for us to take that money from one pocket, put it into another and re-prioritize our top priorities. Rather than go to the tax payers and say, ‘Sorry, we’re going to raise your taxes because we need more money,’ we’re going to look within and find the money that we’re already spending.”
One new line item in this year’s budget is $250,000 going to the Cornerstone Rescue Mission, Rapid City’s only homeless shelter.
Allender says the city is giving funding to Cornerstone to help alleviate funding the organization depends on but is likely to no longer receive.
Allender says each homeless person costs the city, on average, $40,000 a year in police, fire and ambulatory services…
“So, imagine if we were to turn 100 chronic homeless people out onto the streets tomorrow," Allender says. "We would be facing a crisis. All of our police and fire resources would be taken up; we may have a tent city in a city park. This is something we want to avoid. It’s important, I think, for the city, for the taxpayers to put money toward something that has a chance of rehabilitating homeless people.”
Council voted 8 to 2 in favor of the budget, which goes into effect on January 1st.