GEORGETOWN, Texas — The pandemic forced cities, counties and states to tighten their budgets. After an economically trying year, Georgetown found itself with $5.6 million left over from its 2020 budget.
On Tuesday night, city council determined approximately $900,000 would be spent on winter storm recovery, police investigations, neighborhood plans and City vehicles. The remaining $4.7 million would move to a Council Special Reserve Fund to be spent later.
"Traditionally, they put excess dollars in there to have basically a set of dollars to address unforeseen expenditures just in case, or if there are specific projects or priorities that they have," City Manager David Morgan said.
"We have a budget surplus because revenues were higher than anticipated and expenses were lower because the impact of the COVID shutdowns were not as bad as we thought they would be," Georgetown Mayor Josh Schroeder said on Facebook.
According to Morgan, the funds don't have too many restrictions for spending. However, the City won't use the money toward continued spending, such as hiring new positions, because it is extra. City council discussed using it toward one-time expenditures such as paying down debt or a city parking study.
"The direction the council gave is just to hold and keep those dollars as excess reserve funds, because just being able to to deal with any additional expenses related to the winter storm that we might see, as well as to use those in the future when they're considering larger budget decisions," Morgan said.
According to the City's debt transparency website, Georgetown currently has $323,455,000 in outstanding debt. Most of that is covered by taxes, bonds or other investments.
Morgan added he has never encountered such a high excess fund at the end of a fiscal year.
"We saw our development activity is continuing to be very strong," Morgan said. "That's 30% higher than what we saw in 2019. And then sales tax growth is 14% over what we saw in 2019. So we've seen tremendous growth in our community as resulting in revenues, as well as we had a really conservative expenditure plan due to just being precautious going through the pandemic, making sure that we reduced our budgets."
According to data provided to city council, as of January 2021, Georgetown is on track to finish the 2021 fiscal year with an excess of $2.1 million. Morgan said that's a bit more typical, but still on the high end for excess funds.
"I've [seen] excess dollars in the general fund of over a million dollars to around $2 million, but nothing to the level of what we've seen here," Morgan said.
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