CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF)- With the end of the fiscal year coming soon, Hamilton County must adopt a new budget.
Mayor Weston Wamp unveiled his proposal Wednesday afternoon.
The mayor’s budget is roughly $6.6 million dollars higher than Fiscal Year 2027, with the total budget being over $1.1 billion dollars.
Roughly $670 million dollars of that is next year’s school budget.
Within the mayor’s proposal, he says his main priorities include an additional $3.5 million for county road improvements, especially in county areas like Ooltewah and Middle Valley.
Mayor Wamp said, “These projects are coming along, but you wouldn’t know it yet just because there is an engineering process and then a legal process with the right of way acquisition process. But we feel like we’re making enough progress that we now can take a look at what those next few projects will be.”
Much of this will come from the county’s general fund balance, which the county’s finance director Lee Brouner says currently contains over $140 million.
Commissioner David Sharpe argues the county needs to find other ways to generate more funding for road projects.
Sharpe said, “Communities across the country have various mechanisms that they use for revenue generation to address these types of projects. I mean at some point we’re going to have to do something different. We can’t keep going to the fund balance.”
Mayor Wamp said that he believed these road projects were of high importance and should have already been funded, but says that he believes the county will not have a need to continue this practice.
Other priorities within the budget include a two percent pay increase for all county employees, the creation of a planning agency for rural areas, and nearly five million dollars of additional funds for public safety.
The mayor says one of the top pressures on the budget is a nearly ten percent increase in health insurance premium costs for county employees, which he says is a problem all businesses and governments have been facing for the past several years.
Mayor Wamp said, “We have tried to work really diligently to be able to protect them and their families from the increased cost of health insurance. That’s not the case in every business. A lot of people have seen their health insurance costs go way up, and we don’t want to pass that along to especially our first responders… If this rate of inflation continues though it will be difficult on us moving forward.”
The mayor says this budget will not require an increase despite the pressures of inflation.
Mayor Wamp said, “It is a lot easier for the county to say at the beginning of the we really need $20 million, let’s go just take it from the people of Hamilton County. We have tried very diligently to prioritize things in a way that will fit into a balanced budget on existing revenue… We’ve tried to pinch because we know people are pinching pennies.”
The Hamilton County Commission is expected to vote on this budget on June 17.
