North Las Vegas sees more budget cuts coming

Wednesday, July 21, 2010 | 9:34 p.m.

Shari Buck

The North Las Vegas City Council heard an update on the city’s finances Wednesday night, and the take-away message was this: Budget cuts have been effective, but there’s more to come.

Alfonso Noyola, the city’s acting director of administrative services and finance, said the city brought in about $800,000 more in consolidated tax revenue than expected during the 2009-2010 fiscal year.

But in upcoming years, the city is expected to see the gap widen between spending and revenue.

“In order to fix that, either revenues must go up or expenditures must go down,” he said.

The city ended this fiscal year with a projected $21.9 million left in its general fund, Noyola said. That’s $2.4 million more than the $19.5 million the city anticipated.

The city is still waiting for May and June consolidated tax revenues to come in, Noyola said.

The assessed valuation for the city is $4.7 billion, the same as it was in 2005. In 2008, the assessed valuation of the city’s properties was $9.1 billion.

“Keep in mind that residential declines have been a significant impact to our city,” Noyola said.

Noyola said that during the next couple of months, the Finance Department’s team will be meeting with other city departments to discuss ways to cut spending.

The finance department has given “some general guidance” for reductions, Noyola said. They include streamlining services, consolidation, increasing fees and reducing services.

After the presentation, none of the council member asked questions.

Mayor Shari Buck said she was hopeful for the city’s future, especially because the city announced that Amonix, a California-based solar power company, will be creating 278 jobs this year.

“I’m not giving up yet,” she said.

Comments
Print
E-mail
Share
- Facebook
- Fark
- Digg
- Reddit
- Stumble
Tweet

Discussion: comments so far…

Comments are moderated by Las Vegas Sun editors. Our goal is not to limit the discussion, but rather to elevate it. Comments should be relevant and contain no abusive language. Comments that are off-topic, vulgar, profane or include personal attacks will be removed. Full comments policy. Additionally, we now display comments from trusted commenters by default. Those wishing to become a trusted commenter need to verify their identity or sign in with Facebook Connect to tie their Facebook account to their Las Vegas Sun account. For more on this change, read our story about how it works and why we did it.

Only trusted comments are displayed on this page. Untrusted comments have expired from this story.

No trusted comments have been posted.

By neiman1

July 22, 2010

2:06 a.m.

Flag

Contracting out for city services needs to be the first option. Nothing eats up more of a governments budget than payroll. Cities across America are finding they can do much more with contracted services than by having direct employees with their higher salaries and bloated benefits. There is no reason to have any city employees beyond police and they can be contracted from another agency.
By ronster

July 22, 2010

7 a.m.

Flag

@neiman1

Cities should outsource to the private sector where appropriate, but government can not operate completely like the private sector. I'm not saying that government should not be good stewarts of the money they receive, but private business and government are two different operations.
By unclegig (Greg Biason)

July 22, 2010

9:51 a.m.

Flag

The fairest way to cover the deficit is equal cuts (percentage) in all department budgets without exception. There should be a flexible adjustments of salaries based on the revenues coming in. If the revenue increases, then pay raise will be given to the employees. Please, no more automatic raises!
By wolf85023

July 22, 2010

10:38 a.m.

Flag

What ever it takes JUST DO IT.
By copmom

July 30, 2010

7:19 a.m.

Flag

Think hard before making any cuts to the police force. It's already understaffed, especially at night.