POUGHKEEPSIE – The 2017 Poughkeepsie city budget may have been adopted just days ago, with the mayor’s vetoes intact, but the administration will begin working on a 2018 spending plan already in the next several weeks.
City residents will be forced to bite the bullet of a 16.5 percent property tax increase in the new year, but when all is said and done, Poughkeepsie’s financial condition should be improved, said Mayor Robert Rolison.
“You start working on the ’18 budget when ’17 starts and we will see where we end up in ’16 and what we can expect because a lot of these things were built into the budget because of revenues that didn’t materialize so we are going to take a hard look at how it went in ’16,” Rolison said. “But, we are optimistic that ’16 will be better than ’15 and then ’17 will be better than ’16 and we are going to get out of the woods, but it is a multi-year process.”
Poughkeepsie has a new city administrator and finance commissioner. Rolison believes with continued belt tightening, the city will turn its financial picture around.
