2021/05/10 - Mayor's Column: New Fiscal Year

“An Open Door to O’Fallon”
A Weekly Note from Mayor Herb Roach
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As we start our new 2021-2022 Fiscal Year (began on May 1, 2021), I thought you might want to know some information on the financials of your City and how we ended up last year.

To start, the City has rolled back its real-estate tax rate for the fourth consecutive year.  Over the past four years. we have worked to reduce the City tax rate by over 12%. The city’s new tax rate will be the lowest since 2009.

We are also proud to announce that we have reduced the City’s long-term debt again this year; and have now lowered it by 25% during the past four years. To go along with that, we have taken advantage of our good bond rating (AA+) and low interest rates to decrease the interest on some of our remaining debt.  We did this without adding any additional length of time for payments.  It was purely a reduction of interest and annual payments.

During the last fiscal year, we held back on about 30% of our planned expenditures because we did not know how the restrictions put upon our businesses would impact us or if we were going to see reductions from the State and what we might need to do to help our citizens, businesses and schools.

We did try to help our, citizens, businesses, and our schools in several ways.  Among the things that we did were helping our schools with face coverings, offering programs for children when not in school, reducing the Liquor License and Electronic Gambling Machine Licenses to reflect when they were closed due to the State restrictions.  We also eliminated the annual increase in our Water and Sewer rates knowing that people were having to spend more time at home. We were also able to get a grant for $750,000 that we gave out to over 50 of our businesses that were impacted by the COVID restrictions.

With all the above said and done, we closed out the last fiscal year with a balanced budget. 

The new budget for this fiscal year is at $91.9 Million, which is about 10% larger than last year.  This is made possible because our income last year was not hurt as bad as we anticipated for last year, and we held back on about 30% of our planned expenditures.

Since we have the revenue, we will proceed with completing the projects that were put on hold from last year.

As residents of O’Fallon, you should always be able to reach out to your elected officials and ask questions about what is happening in O’Fallon. Having open communications is important to me and something I care very deeply about. Thank you for reading, and please remember, my door is always open!