Sun Valley approved its tentative budget for fiscal year 2011 on Monday, backing Mayor Wayne Willich's proposal to give $400,000 to the much-discussed marketing board that would take over advertising of the resort area.
Under the budget, the city wouldn't give any funding directly to the Sun Valley-Ketchum Visitors Bureau because it would be placed underneath the marketing board.
The council's approval of the draft budget in no way finalizes it. Before the city can adopt the budget, it will hold three public hearings on Aug. 3, 10 and 17 to gather residents' opinions.
The proposed $5.7 million budget is only 2 percent larger than this year's estimated $5.6 million budget. And the city predicts business to remain stunted, evident in the $1.1 million in local-option taxes expected. The decade's average is $1.4 million.
The council wasn't in unanimous approval of the budget. Councilwoman Joan Lamb cast the lone nay in the room, and not because of the shift in marketing dollars away from the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau.
She disapproved of Willich's budget decision to take $200,000 out of the current fiscal year's workforce-housing fund to be put into the city's contingency fund. A contingency fund is used for costs unforeseen in planning the budget.
"We ought to have a balanced budget every year based on what our expected income is for that year," Lamb said, "not using income from prior years."
She said she's not against a contingency fund, but the money shouldn't come out of reserves.
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"We don't want to be living beyond our means," she said.
However, Councilman Dewayne Briscoe argued, reserve funds are for rainy days.
"And it's raining out there," he said.
Councilman Bob Youngman said he saw where Lamb was coming from.
"As I do with my own finances, spending of reserves is a last resort, not common practice," he said.
But, he said, no plan exists for the workforce-housing fund. And the Government Finance Officers Association, a professional group of 17,500 local government finance officers in the United States and Canada, says that if no plan exists, the fund should not exist.
"If we have no plan, that fund should be zeroed out, eliminated," he said, "and the funds should be transferred to the general fund. That's what the GFOA says."
To see the tentative budget, go to sunvalley.govoffice.com, then pull down the "Agendas & Packets" tab. Then, go to the City Council's June 28 packet.
The budget is scheduled to be finalized later this summer. The new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1.
