Harrisburg City Council met tonight to pass the city’s 2019 budget.
One week after disputes with the mayor’s office delayed its scheduled budget vote, Harrisburg City Council tonight approved a 2019 municipal budget that calls for no tax increases and flat spending in the new year.
The budget, which allocates $6.8 million in capital improvement spending and reorganizes city employees into a new departmental structure, is largely unchanged from the one Mayor Eric Papenfuse proposed in November.
Council was originally scheduled to vote on the 2019 budget at its Dec. 18 legislative session.
Council members decided last week to table the budget discussion until they could resolve disagreements over the mayor’s proposals to increase employee salaries and reorganize staff within city hall.
Ultimately, council members did not amend the mayor’s proposed spending for 2019, but they did attach two conditions to their approval of the budget tonight. First, the mayor must provide written justifications for awarding any salary increases greater than 5 percent, and, secondly, must also provide council with quarterly reports of unused salary funds.
Council also amended the 2019 budget to re-institute the director of community and economic development position, a role that was omitted from the city’s organizational chart in the mayor’s proposed reorganization.
The amendment does not carry any new funding, so the city’s 2019 spending plan is unchanged. Councilman Ben Allatt said that the city will seek grants in the new year to pay a salary for a new director.
Council President Wanda Williams said last week that council members wanted to use surplus funds to pay down debt, but that proposal did not come up at tonight’s 20-minute meeting.
As always, the city’s largest operating expenditure in 2019 — $32.7 million — will be on personnel. Debt service and healthcare will eat up $9.8 million and $11 million from the operating budget, respectively.
Even though personnel expenses increased by $500,000 from 2018, Papenfuse said a priority for the 2019 budget is to maintain Harrisburg’s current staff capacity, which his administration has rebuilt after years of austerity.
Rather than add new personnel in 2019, the mayor proposed reorganizing the city’s departments to more closely align with the city council committee structure.
The city’s new organizational chart creates seven city departments to correspond with the seven council committees. The chart dissolves the Department of Community of Economic Development and replaces it with the Department of Engineering and Development.
The reorganization was due in part to the resignation of Community and Economic Development Director Jackie Parker, who left the city in September for a new job in the private sector.
Council’s amendment tonight would place the director of Community and Economic Development in the city’s administrative department, reporting to Business Administrator Marc Woolley.
The duties of the role are not yet defined, and will depend on the skillset of the person who fills the role if the city can fund it, Papenfuse said.
Harrisburg’s 2019 budget also allocates $4.8 million from the Neighborhood Services fund for capital improvement projects, including:
- $2.5 million for the acquisition of a new public works building
- $250,000 to outsource the demolition of abandoned buildings
- $2 million in new equipment for parks maintenance.
An additional $2.5 million in allocations will allow the city to finance its share of grant-funded transportation projects. Among them are:
- $517,000 to construct new sheltered bike lanes and a traffic circle on N. 7th Street
- $345,000 to repave two miles of Riverfront Park’s lower riverwalk, a segment stretching from Maclay Street to Shipoke.
- $270,000 for landscaping and construction to complete the MulDer Square revitalization project.
- $250,000 to complete the 3rd Street repaving project, which was delayed this year by heavy summer rain.
The budget also allocates money from the city’s general fund to purchase new equipment for other city departments. Those expenditures include $700,000 for the IT department to replace aging infrastructure and purchase off-site data storage.
The police bureau will also receive $150,000 for the purchase of body cameras, a figure that includes $70,000 in unspent funds for the same purpose in this year’s budget.
Papenfuse said the city can expect to see body cameras in 2019, despite initial promises they would be rolled out this year. Police said this fall that it took longer than expected to identify what kind of equipment they wanted.
Councilwoman Shamaine Daniels cast the lone dissenting vote against the budget tonight. After the meeting, she said that she doubted the accuracy of the data that the mayor’s office provided during budget talks in November and December.
