ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
Budget time is officially here, and the City of Liberal is among many, many governing entities making sure every dollar is accounted for.
According to City of Liberal Chief Financial Officer Scarlette Diseker, this year’s budget process went very well.
“We proposed a total budget amount of $61,694,205 with a mill levy dollar amount of $6,932,800. This equates to an estimated mill levy of 49.472 mills, which based upon the July 1 estimated valuation from Seward County, and that is 3.815 mills lower than what was contained in last year’s budget,” Diseker said. “The overall budget includes everything from the General Fund to the Enterprise Fund to the 1-cent sales tax and everything in between, including all the economic development incentive benefits the City of Liberal offers. Something a lot of people probably don’t understand – and something I didn’t understand totally until I came to City Hall and really started looking under the hood, so to speak – is how the budget as a whole is not totally funded by mill levy dollars, so someone might look at that $61,694,205 number and think ‘That’s a lot of money!’ But so much of that has to do with our utility funds, the 1-cent sales tax funds, the economic development incentives, and everything else. As time has gone on, and as inflation has become an issue, those numbers have tended to rise somewhat, but we balance the budget, we make sure everything is going where it needs to be, and we have offsetting revenue too to accommodate that.”
A main priority for the budget process this time around, Diseker said, was making sure everyone had a voice.
“The budget process starts around May every year, that’s when we start exporting spreadsheets, and then we send those out in June to all the department heads, who fill those out with needs and wants, and they also give a five-year plan of what they think their capital expenses will look like and what they will definitely need in the future,” Diseker said. “Something I took rather seriously was reviewing all of that early on in order to see where I could possibly move some expenses or reduce expenses and maybe find some offsetting revenue, because the first aspect we look at is the expenses. Another idea I implemented was bringing in every department head and visit with them, and we go over their lists, and we go through every line and dissect everything, and we actually were able to find a fair amount of cost savings throughout. That process takes a long time, it’s about a six-week period where we talk with those department heads and go over their spreadsheets and then put them in our system. We go over those capital expenses and make sure we’re looking at definite needs that will be beneficial to everyone, which is really important to me.”
A big part of her role, Diseker said, is making sure the city is successful.
“One of the biggest reasons I came to City Hall is because I love Liberal, I was born and raised here, and I want to make sure the city is successful, so any way I can contribute, I want to do,” Diseker said. “It eventually all gets to the operational aspect of printing budget books and setting up work sessions with the Liberal City Commission and bringing in the department heads to talk to them, and that’s typically a full day in itself. Something else I always work toward is breaking down the budget in a way for everyone to understand, because when you first look at it, it can look intimidating – even for someone like me who’s worked in finance for a long time, the first time I looked at it, my first thought was ‘WHAT am I looking at?’ So I knew I wanted to make the budget more palatable for the public. I ended up being very pleased with how that work session went, everything went really smoothly and successfully. Typically, through the process of dealing with the department heads and looking at expenses, I am given a directive from either the city manager or the commissioners as far as where they want to go and how things should be handled, and I then start building around that directive to see if I can meet that.”
As with every year, however, Diseker said there were some requests that had to be deferred.
“For me personally, taking care of safety and security is paramount, so those items typically go to the top, like communications equipment or other necessary equipment for the Liberal Police Department and Liberal Fire Department. That absolutely does not mean the other departments are not important, because there is also safety to consider when talking about cybersecurity and other things like that,” Diseker said. “But we did have to push certain other expenses like software changes and other things like that – there were certain aspects the department heads weren’t too fond of, but we also talked about whether it might be an issue of some extra training needed to help understand it all better. But overall, because I came from banking and brought a lot of those ideas and systems with me, I’ve got a revenue-generating mind, so I’m always thinking about how we can make purchases without putting a strain on the taxpayers, which is really important. Our department heads are also really great at knowing what they absolutely need and what’s more of a want that could potentially get filled in the future, and we try to prioritize everything as much as we can.”
Overall, however, Diseker said she was pleased with the results of this year’s budget work.
“I like to listen to the people I work with, and the feedback from our department heads was very positive. They told me they felt it was an extremely efficient work session and they were pleased with the decisions that were made. And budget time is not always easy, we can’t say yes to everyone for everything – there might be something that’s a ‘no’ for this year but a ‘yes’ for next year, it just depends on the circumstances,” Diseker said. “My job is to make sure the city is in good financial shape, and another part of my job is to make sure we’re on a good path for years to come and keeping good staffing levels and retaining/taking care of employees. The feedback from the department heads was very positive, the feedback from the commissioners was also very positive and they said they were pleased with how we were able to reduce the mill levy some, which is very important to many people in Liberal. But that doesn’t come easily because there are many, many factors to be considered, and I feel like we provided the best possible scenario for the citizens of Liberal. We have a lot of governing entities, and we want to make sure we do what’s best for our citizens and provide safety and infrastructure and all those services, but we also want to give them a bit of breathing room so they can live their lives and not feel like so much of their money is going toward taxes.”
Diseker also talked about the City of Liberal and the Revenue Neutral Rate.
“We did pass a resolution earlier this summer of our intent to exceed the Revenue Neutral Rate, but it wasn’t because we were necessarily planning on doing so,” Diseker said. “As the city manager explained at that meeting, one of the reasons people do that is to gain some more time to finalize some budget numbers and figure out where we’re going and what we’re doing. Ultimately, we did not exceed the Revenue Neutral Rate for this year, we actually took the mill down below that number, and that was due, in a large part, to a commitment to new revenue generation, follow-through on reimbursements owed to the city, and overall lowering of expenses where it made sense to do so. The Revenue Neutral Rate is a really hot topic because we have to figure out where we need to be raise the same amount of dollars as the year before, and we actually came in below that for this year, which we’re really pleased about.”
Even though the budget was recently passed, however, Diseker said the work is not entirely finished.
“This is my second budget season, and I remember with my first budget season last year, my hair was almost on end learning how everything works and trying to figure out what works the best,” Diseker said. “This time around, everything went very smoothly and I had a lot of support from my staff and everyone else in City Hall, which I greatly appreciate. I’m also glad the commission gives me a directive as far as how to proceed, because it gives me a clearer path and helps me stay inside the lines, so to speak. I know every governing entity’s goal is to lessen the burden on the taxpayers, but sometimes, circumstances change and difficult decisions have to be made, so we have to be adaptable. The budget is never the same two years in a row, and it’s all about dissecting everything and figuring out what we can do to alleviate the burden on not only the taxpayers, but also the General Fund, since that’s what takes the brunt of everything every year. And with how inflation has been an issues the past couple of years, we’re all really pleased with how we were able to work with all the department heads and balance everything as much as possible. For the most part, the requests were either honored or promised to be fulfilled in the future. We can’t be Santa Claus and grant everyone’s wishes, but we’re going to make sure our departments are taken care of as much as possible so they can run as efficiently as possible. We’re very pleased with this budget, and we’ll be keeping a good eye on it as the year goes on, and I want people to know we’re doing the best we can with the taxpayers’ money.”
