PORT JERVIS – For the last several weeks, Port Jervis Mayor Kelly Decker has warned there would be no way the city could stay within the state’s tax cap of 0.68 percent.
Decker presented his proposed 2017 city budget to the common council Monday night with a 7.71 percent tax hike. A number of factors have led to that increase not least of which is a downgrading of the city’s bond rating by Moody’s Investor Service of A1 to A3. There are other financial issues plaguing the city.
“A depleted fund balance that cannot be tapped to ease some of the pain of a tax increase; running a city that despite some of rumors that it doesn’t pay its bills, because I have seen that on Facebook, it does pay its bills, but sometimes it has to borrow for larger items; a city, which over the last two decades saw either below or near zero percent increases in taxes for at least eight of those years,” the mayor said.
The budget includes no cuts in services or city personnel.
Decker was able to lower the tax rate from more than 30 percent when he first began crunching numbers.
It is up to the common council to review the spending plan and make any changes adopting it by the end of the year.
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