The Peoria City Council asked city manager Patrick Urich to create a variety of potential borrowing and cutting scenarios for them to consider next Tuesday to balance the city's budget.
Reduced revenues and fee collections due to COVID-19 and its accompanying economic downturn put the city in the need to make more than $50 million in cuts to balance the 2020 budget.
Councilman Sid Ruckriegel suggested looking at ranges of $5, 10, or 15 million of operating expense cuts like layoffs or service reductions, coupled with levels of capital improvement cuts varying from $23 to $28 million. The rest would be made up by borrowing and refinancing. A fourth option would look at no operating cuts and only capital cuts and borrowing or restructuring.
"I think if we look at our budget process, the budget that we normally get is not anywhere close to where we end up," said Ruckriegel. "But I think by looking at each category separately, we're not seeing the interrelationship between the categories and so we're getting hung up."
The council is set to come back next Tuesday to weigh those scenarios and potentially vote.
Combined sewer overflow fix on hold
City Manager Patrick Urich said the finalization of a long-looming consent decree with the U.S. EPA to fix the decades-old problem of raw sewage into the Illinois River after major rain or snowfall is on hold due to COVID-19.
"That's one of the things that we've just simply asked that we just wait and see what the economic ramifications of this pandemic are before we move into signing a consent decree," said Urich.
City manager Patrick Urich said in January the enforcement process for addressing the city's ongoing Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) problem, which began in earnest in 2006, was finally set to wrap up this year.
The city proposed a cheaper, green infrastrucure plan incorporating rain garden, permeable pavers and other fixes that was projected to cost around $200 million in 2015. That's about $300 million less than the traditional, "gray" infrastructure approach.
Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis said he's asked the city's general counsel in Washington D.C. to inquire about dismissing the EPA's enforcement action as a form of federal stimulus, but he's not optimistic about the prospects.
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