College Station City Council holds budget open house

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – College Station citizens had an opportunity to see how the upcoming budget was put together and ask city leaders questions on Monday.

It was part of a budget open house, a come-and-go event that was held from 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. at College Station City Hall. This is the first time the city has held an event of this type according to College Station Mayor John Nichols. The goal was to provide citizens with a chance to ask questions and provide transparency in a relaxed environment without a time limit.

Assistant city manager, Jeff Kersten said the budget process is important and with it being a lot of information it could be overwhelming for people.

“What we wanted to do is provide some different ways for people to provide input to the city to the city council as we go through the budget process,” Kersten said.

Despite the rain, several citizens did make the trip to ask questions including Keith Sylvester who wanted to see how things work and had questions about water wells and electricity.

“The things that I would like for the city to consider is we’re looking at where do we get our water from with the current situation of using wells that are drying out. The other idea is when we talk about electricity, and buying electricity large solar farms are now possible. So are we considering investing in ourselves and creating our own electricity and putting it back into the grid to our citizens then sell it to others,” Sylvester said.

Another Citizen Peter Brown came out because he was curious about how to find certain details in the budget.

“In particular I was curious about how the overall scope of the budget and how much of that was taken up by capital projects that would involve taking on debt and how choices of which of those projects that you are taking on vs cash flow,” Brown said.

Both said the meeting helped them understand where the city was and the budget.

“It means a lot,” Sylvester said about the open house. “I read the budget before I came today so it was good to see that, this is not a simple task, running a city is real complex like running a business. Outside looking in we think it’s so easy, or so simple. It’s a very complex group of mechanisms that have to come together, so coming today is my effort to understand those mechanisms.”

This budget will use an extra 5.2 million dollars in proposed property tax revenue to help pay for capital projects including a new fire station and streets. The city does plan for the tax rate to stay the same.

The city points out College Station’s population has nearly doubled since 2000. Online records show the budget has more than tripled in that time. This upcoming year’s budget is 540.5 million dollars.

“We have probably close to 130 thousand people living in college 70 thousand plus folks going to A&M so as we continue to have that kind of growth it provides challenges for us to provide services to make sure we can provide a good safe community, so that we can provide the parks and recreation facilities that people need, that families need, that older adults need that all parts of the community need,” Sylvester said.

This upcoming Thursday the city will hold a public hearing on the budget during its regular meeting. Nichols said he believes each council member has received inquiries about the budget.

“Appraisal have gone up so our revenue is increasing. We’re entertaining an increase in our capital budget this year, but that is a result of a normal process since we had a recent bond issue that passed. We spent last year planning some of those projects like the new fire station and some of the park amenities and improvements voted on by the citizens will also be included in next year’s capital budget. The budget has gone up significantly but it’s mostly on the capital side.”