East Lansing's Budget Process
- changemediagroup
- Feb 7, 2015
- 1 min read
This morning the East Lansing City Council held our annual budget retreat, which is the first step in our community's annual budget process. This will be my eighth budget as a member of the City Council. Each year I am impressed by the professionalism, expertise, and dedication of our City staff. Today was no exception.
Like all Michigan communities, we continue to be challenged by unfunded liabilities and rising costs, paired with a broken municipal finance system. We also have significant infrastructure reinvestment needs that must be addressed. Expect to hear more about each of these issues in the weeks and months to come. Our fiscal discipline and willingness to make hard choices have helped East Lansing weather the Great Recession and a decade of disinvestment by state government. Our community cannot afford to abandon that discipline now.
During this budget process, we will also need to confront two Big Budget Lies:
1) That we can afford to do everything and don't need to make hard choices about our community's investment priorities. We cannot.
and
2) That we can continue to provide the level of service our residents expect and deserve without growth. We cannot.
Over the course of the next several weeks, I will be sharing information about the financial health of our community, the budgetary challenges we face, and our options for addressing them. Stay tuned.
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