Tonight the Bangor City Council officially accepts the Annual Report for fiscal year 2023, which ended on June 20, 2023. As I’ve noted in a previous post, typically the report gets delivered to Council in the December following the close of the fiscal year. For the past few years that report has been late. None more so than this year, which clocked in at one year, twenty-two days after the close of Fiscal Year 2023.
The report is available for your review on the city of Bangor’s website. Some highlights:
Property Tax Rate:
- The property tax rate decreased from $22.30 per $1,000 of assessed value in FY2022 to $20.40 in FY2023. This is generally positive for taxpayers. Except for…
Assessed Value:
- The total taxable assessed value increased from $2.72 billion in FY2022 to $3.06 billion in FY2023. While this indicates growth, you don’t need me to tell you it also meant higher tax bills for property owners despite the lower tax rate. And renters didn’t get left out of the suffering. That’s a cost increase to landlords, which gets passed on to tenants in many cases.
- Everyone is feeling the squeeze, and people are questioning why, because…
General Fund Balance:
- The unassigned General Fund balance increased from $16.3 million in FY2022 to $19.9 million in FY2023.
- It should be noted that $19.9 million exceeded the 16.66% threshold (2 months of operations budget). In the nearly 13 months since FY2023 closed, the City Council moved $4.5 million of that unassigned fund balance into various reserves.
- Taxpayers are questioning why the tax rate isn’t being lowered even farther to compensate for the new property value assessments based on the amount of additional revenue that seems to keep piling up. Speaking of which…
Revenues:
- Total governmental activities revenues increased from $147.8 million in FY2022 to $162.0 million in FY2023, largely due to increases in intergovernmental revenue and operating grants.
Expenses:
- Governmental activities expenses increased from $131.4 million in FY2022 to $147.5 million in FY2023.
- While Education expenses saw a notable increase, it should be noted that Bangor Schools entered the fiscal year carrying forward a $4.5 balance and ended FY2023 with a variance of $2.1 million to apply to FY2024 expenses. The School Committee continues to be fiscally responsible with their budgeting.
Long-term Debt:
- Total outstanding bonds and notes decreased slightly from $132.4 million in FY2022 to $123.8 million in FY2023. Servicing this debt continues to be a significant portion our budget, accounting for 4.12% of our noncapital expenditures.
- FY2024 will show the additional bonds approved by City Council during this past fiscal year, including $13.3 million worth of bonds from last August.
Another pitch for a better Annual Report
I made the pitch before for the City to publish an annual report more in line with reports from decades ago. The city used to publish two reports. One would provide important context about each department that truly gave citizens a sense of the city’s activities during that year. The other was the book of spreadsheets for those that want to truly dig into the numbers. These days we only get the latter.
The citizens of Bangor deserve an easily digestible report about the affairs of their community. If you want more citizens engaged in their local government (and we do), it shouldn’t take research and a calculator to know the basic activities of each department within City Hall.
I’m running for Bangor City Council again this year, and have officially qualified for the ballot. One of the many issues I’m working on is how we can get our city government to prepare annual reports like it did in the past. We all deserve to be well informed about our city. Transparency is important to me. As citizens of Bangor, and residents of Maine, it also is our right.
City employees stand to benefit as well, as those types of reports would give citizens a better picture of hard work each department puts in each year. They certainly deserve to be recognized!
