Whitefish City Council approves budget including tax decrease

The Whitefish City Council voted unanimously on Aug. 21 to approve the city’s 2024 fiscal year final budget, totaling $51 million. Last year’s total approved budget was $53.4 million.

“Given the value increase that we received from the Department of Revenue, which was an increase of 60%, roughly... and some other factors… we were able to actually keep our property tax revenue flat,” City Manager Dana Smith said.

Property tax revenue remains unchanged from the previous year and will provide relief to taxpayers for another year as the same amount of required revenue is shared among current and newly taxable properties, the city staff report states.

A home with a market value of about $700,000 that had no new improvements during the 2022 calendar year would see an estimated annual decrease of about $55 on the city’s portion of the property tax bill.

“It's not the taxable value increase as much as it is, we're able to keep our property tax revenue flat due to other factors and the new taxable property is helping take on that burden which is resulting in a decrease,” Smith said.

Smith said the final budget changed significantly from the preliminary budget. The city had anticipated the need to increase property tax collections as a result of a decrease in resort tax collections.

Resort tax collections are down about 16% from the previous year.

The actual fund balance came in higher than projected due to the conservative nature of the projection. Much of that difference was for water and wastewater due to projects being continued into the next year along with savings by departments and a new investment strategy.

“We were able to work with our local banks, making sure that we’re getting the best rate of return for our checking account,” Smith said. “Our projected income on our investment earnings, we collected almost $350,000… more than we thought we would collect.”

Smith was quick to add that interest rates change, but right now, it has helped the city to not have a tax increase.

She said the projected fund balance for FY24 for property tax supported funds would be at about 45%.

“We’re sitting in a very good financial position should an economic downturn happen, we can utilize those funds as needed,” Smith said.

One of the changes from the preliminary budget was an addition of $100,000 to the water and wastewater funds to provide for facility plan updates to support updating the growth policy.

An additional change in the budget was due to Senate Bill 536 that allocated money to smaller towns. Whitefish will receive a one-time payment of $813,000 for road maintenance and improvements.

There was no public comment on the budget.

Councilor Rebecca Norton said that although people are upset about their tax bills, the city’s portion of the bill is only 24%.

“We’re probably even less than that, but the city is reducing our portion of a tax bill unless you’ve a newly taxable property or you’ve added on to your property during the last year, you should see a tax decrease and it’s going to vary based on what your growth and value was,” said Smith.

Councilor Frank Sweeney moved to approve the bundle of resolutions regarding the final budget and the motion passed unanimously.

The council also voted unanimously to adopt the FY24-FY28 Capital Improvement Program. The plan contains 108 projects totaling about $50 million. Twenty-six percent of the project costs are related to the plans for water supply and storage.

“The [CIP] encompasses the planned expenditures for capital that have a useful life of 10 years and over the value of $5,000 for all of the various departments,” Whitefish Financial Director Lanie Gospodarek said. “It’s a living document, so while we have plans for the next fiscal year it gets adapted to what we need going forward.”