The City of Cypress is finally strong, but headwinds remain, the city’s Finance Director told the Council while explaining the new budget year that begins July 1.
“We are strong, and that’s really good,” Finance Director Matt Burton told the City Council at its June 12 meeting. “But at the same time, it seems like whenever we have good news and we’re in a good spot, there’s always something lurking around the corner that threatens our financial condition.”
According to the budget presented by Burton, the city expects revenues of $41.7 million for 2023-24, while budgeted expenditures are expected to come in at $37.6 million.
He said an additional $1.9 million will be taken from reserves to aid the city’s capital projects, but overall, he said the city is projecting an overall surplus of $500,000, compared to the current budget year, which is expected to come in at an $800,000 deficit.
“We’ve really turned the tables over the last year,” he said, suggesting that economic conditions are tenuous going forward.
“And for the year that we’re coming up upon, we’ve all heard about inflation. It’s really dominated the headlines for the last 18 months. And what we understand conceptually, what it means to the city basically everything we buy everything we do, everything we buy just costs more,” said Burton.
“We’re still figuring out what the exact impacts are going to be,” he added.
Burton said city government, in essence, is a “service organization” and “as such, people are getting more expensive to employ and we’re finding that it’s getting harder to identify and find qualified applicants” for city positions.
“And this extends not only to our employee base but also when we hire contractors to perform some of the services as well,” he said.
“Realistically, in periods of high inflation, you know, our revenues can’t keep pace. And then, that will only be exacerbated if we go into some sort of a recession,” said Burton.
Despite the headwinds, Burton said Cypress remains on a very solid financial footing.
“But I don’t want to let these uncertainties and fears mask over the fact that we do remain financially healthy and stable,” the city’s finance director said, “but we do have to keep in the back of our minds that inflation and recession are not allies of the city.”
In addition, he said the city would unveil an online budgeting tool in July that will allow citizens to keep track of the budget.
He said the new system will include two components, which is a general online budget with colors and graphics to assist onlookers as well as a tool that built for “drilling in to see more details of the budget.”
I’m not sure there’s going to be an overwhelming demand for that,” said Burton, “but that’s not the point. The point is it’s there for anyone who is interested, and it really gives people more convenient and easy access to information.”
