Kewaunee council approves 2025 budget, tax levy

KEWAUNEE – During its Dec. 2 meeting, the Kewaunee Common Council adopted its 2025 budget and tax levy.

City Administrator Heath Eddy said that the budget numbers “included a 3% cost of living adjustment for all employees, except for police department, which patrol was increased by 3.76% under the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) last year — starts next year — deputy chief also is getting 3.76% in line with the CBA and the police chief is going up 4%. And then the other one is the administrative assistant who works in the department — both part-time here and part-time in the back — she’ll get a 5% increase, which is to say a $1 increase. Everybody else has got a 3% increase adjustment,” he explained.

“One of the clear factors here is that because our net construction increase was 0.45% for last year; that means that we could only increase our budget — our actual tax levy only increased by $12,763 — that’s on the operating side.

“The other part of the tax levy that’s going up is the part that funds the increase in debt levy, which is going up about $47,000, so the total is about $65,000 or something around that number.

“So taxes per $100,000 of value are roughly $28 over this year; that’s the levy side. That’s the part that is basically instituted as a result of Act 10. That’s the max limit you can do on the operating side. The debt levy side, you could actually go up higher but it’s not typically considered a good idea to go that high. We are currently sitting at about 38% — I think 38-39% of our available debt levy under state law.”

Eddy said that the city is also seeing a healthcare cost increase of 11%.

“Some of that is reflected in part of the state law that requires that people who average 25 hours a week, or a certain amount of hours per year, we are required to offer them insurance by law. So there are some additional people that have been offered insurance because their average hours worked increased up over the minimum,” he added.

Eddy said that while the budget shows a negative balance, lower expenses incurred this year will level the bottom line off.

“The finance Committee at the last meeting, before they recommended to move forward with the budget to council, noted that although this one is still in the red — currently by about $198,000 — it reflects also the fact that as of the end of October, our expenses, actual versus budget, were running about $335,000 ahead of where we expected to be.

“Essentially, we’re running below where we would have anticipated to be by the end of October, so we feel like we’re pretty good shape on the expense side. On the revenue side, we’re missing some pieces, one of them being $570,000 in state share revenue for this year, which they usually don’t send us until near the end of the year. So, we’ll be closing the revenue gap on that pretty quickly.”