Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness and his staff are revealing the 2022 budget proposal to be considered by the City Council.  I watched and listened to the City Council Finance Committee meeting held late last week and reported on that in a story posted August 28 and can be found at this link.

The mayor, his staff and Finance Committee Chair John Weingardt met with the media to discuss the budget during the afternoon of August 31st and more was revealed about next year’s proposed spending plan.

The mayor repeated that city number crunchers had initially projected a 4.1% increase in the city’s share of the Local Income Tax (LIT) but the official numbers from the state now show a 3.6% decrease compared to the previous year.  That is costing Fishers $5 million in revenue for 2022, according to city officials.

Fadness has asked House Speaker Todd Huston, who represents most of Fishers, to look into why this happened.

“How does Hamilton County, when our unemployment rate never really achieved anything near where others did, see that kind of decline in income tax revenue?” Fadness said.  “It’s just a head-scratcher.”

The city is making no accusations that there are errors in the LIT distribution, the mayor just wants this checked out and the city only wants an explanation as to why this happened.

In another LIT-related issue, Carmel will be sending $224,000 in LIT money to Fishers based on an agreement reached to alleviate what Fishers argued was an imbalance in LIT distributions under the state formula.

The mayor is finalizing a new 5-year contract with a provider for employee health insurance.  All workers will be in the Community Health Network under this plan.  60% of city workers are already a part of the Community Network.  The city has not raised employee health premiums for nearly a decade, but the city’s costs have risen.  Fadness says the 5-year horizon will stabilize the city’s funding for the new plan.

The city is budgeting $250,000 for nonprofit organizations as part of the 2022 budget, but the mayor says there may be a change on how that money will be divided up.  In the past few years, a city council committee has decided which organizations will receive city funds and how much will be provided to each group.

“We’re evaluating the best way to do that, the most efficient way to decide where those dollars go,” the mayor said.