Budget Season Underway in Dover

It has been far too long since I last shared an update on Dover City Council happenings from my perspective here, but there has certainly been a lot underway over the past several months. While I will work to get back to writing more regular general updates, I wanted to be sure that you all had the latest information on the FY 2020 budget process for the City.

As I am sure you all have seen from the news, budget season is upon us here in Dover. The School Board recently completed their budget deliberations and the full proposed FY2020 budget for the City of Dover (including budgets for all School and City Departments) was presented to City Council by the City Manager on March 27. The Council has heard several presentations detailing budget requests from Department heads and will continue to hear more over the coming weeks. Two public hearings are scheduled for April 10th (Education Department funding) and 24th (City Department funding) and residents are also welcome to provide comment during Citizen’s Forum at any meeting. We are also happy to receive input by email and phone (contact info for the whole council and individual members is available online).

Listening to the first wave of talented and dedicated Department heads presenting their proposed FY2020 budgets has reminded me yet again how happy I am to live in this community, even while faced with difficult decisions ahead. I think we are lucky to have such committed and knowledgeable City and School staff and to be able to benefit from all the services they work so hard to provide. While I wish we could fully fund every budget request and add in the wish list items, I know there are really difficult decisions ahead this year. As in every year, we face a challenging balancing act on how best to appropriately resource our City and School Departments in the face of more and more demands on a limited revenue source - municipal property taxes.

For those interested in the details of the City Budget, there are some great tools to dig in further on the Dover Budget Revealed website. If you have time, I think the opening summary pages of the budget are useful to skim online (a hard copy is also available at City Hall). Pages 4 – 12 of the actual document (numbered 10 through 20 in the PDF) provide the community overview and letter from the City Manager, while pages 13-20 (numbered 21 through 28 in the PDF) get a little further into the details of the budget and finances of the City. If these topics are of interest, you can also subscribe to the “Budget Revealed” newsletter from the City to get Dover updates for the rest of this cycle and in the future.

The full schedule of upcoming presentations and links to videos of the previous Council meetings on the budget can be found on the FY2020 page of the Budget Revealed website. Upcoming dates include:

  • April 10, 2019, 7 p.m.: Regular meeting, including a public hearing on the education portion of the proposed budget

  • April 17, 2019, 7 p.m.: Budget workshop on the Police, Fire, Recreation and Welfare departmental budgets

  • April 24, 2019, 6 p.m.: Budget workshop on the Community Services budget and general budget discussion; 7 p.m.: Regular meeting, including a public hearing on the City portion of the proposed budget

  • May 1, 2019, 7 p.m.: Budget workshop, followed by a special meeting for adoption of the budget

  • May 8, 2019, 7 p.m.: Regular meeting, which is also reserved as a fallback date for budget adoption, if necessary

We all appreciate the input, feedback, ideas, and questions. Keep it coming!

Lindsey Williams