Apopka city commissioners spent hours Tuesday poring over what Mayor Nick Nesta called a “bare bones” budget only to raise concerns over some proposed cuts — such as funding for longtime community celebrations including Christmas, Easter and Halloween.
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Nesta, in his fifth month as mayor, said the austere proposal was what they and residents told him they wanted to see.
“So what the public and yourself have recommended (is) to remove all fluff, any extras from this budget, it’s what I went back and did,” he said to commisioners gathered at the Apopka Community Center. “It was requested that we bare bones this, that the city of Apopka government is not responsible for anybody’s businesses, for their nonprofits, for not events, this is bare bones.”
Nesta said he slashed spending for numerous community events, including the Martin Luther King Jr. parade, Christmas parade, Halloween in the Park, Breakfast with the Bunny and Holiday Tree Lighting. Also cut was funding events for the 4th of July, Emancipation Day, Hispanic Heritage Celebration, Juneteenth, Memorial Day and Veterans Day, among others.
“I didn’t want to make any assumptions, on one way or the other, so I took them all out, and it’s the commission’s job to add in what they feel is most appropriate to add back in,” he said. “If it’s all of them it’s all of them, but it’s coming from reserves then.”
Vice Mayor Diane Velazquez raised concerns about killing community events, especially the more-popular ones — specifically citing those for Christmas and Halloween.
“The big ones are worth keeping,” Velazquez said. “Certainly the Christmas event (and) Halloween in the Park — I mean our community literally looks forward to that.”
She took time to go over the list of community events with commissioners to gain consensus on ones they wanted to continue supporting, which would mean restoring funding for them.
Commissioners will have the opportunity to do that for community events and their other priorities Thursday evening when they meet again at the community center to adopt the tentative millage rate and budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. Final adoption of the rate and budget are set for Sept. 16 before the regular commission meeting.
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When Finance Director Blanche Sherman noted that $100,000 for grants to community nonprofits was cut, Commissioner Nadia Anderson proposed helping restore it by postponing $75,000 earmarked for renovations to second floor of City Hall. Anderson had been an advocate for creating the program, which launched last year.
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“I feel that the community does want the grant program, and removing that grant program will affect a lot of the communities that we serve in the nonprofit agencies,” she said. “There’s a direct impact to that and I’m 100% against removing that nonprofit grant.”
But Nesta pushed back on further delays, saying it has long been needed and doing so will only increase the cost.
“If you’ve walked up there you’ve seen the need … furniture is beat and used and has been there for decades, the walls aren’t even real walls up there,” he said.
The proposed millage rate for next fiscal year is 4.6761 mills, a 10% increase (just under .24 mills) over the rollback rate of 4.251 mills. Commissioners tried to set the ceiling for any increase at .75 mills, with a goal of reducing it to no more than .50 mills, but needed a unanimous vote to do so and were repeatedly stymied by Anderson.
The proposed rate, with each mill equaling $1 of tax for every $1,000 of a property’s assessed value, will generate about $2.1 million — or 18.9% — in new revenue. An additional $4.68 million in revenue is expected from a 12.8% increase in property values.
A property owner in the city would pay about $468 for every $100,000 of assessed value — about $25 more than the current rate. That could mean property tax bills going up about $100 for a house assessed at $400,000.
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