Rifle City Council approved the proposed 2025 budget presented by City Manager Patrick Waller and Finance Director Scott Rust at the Nov. 6 regular city council meeting. 

Budget priorities are the debt service requirements, maintaining service levels in day to day operations, necessary capital projects and finally expansion services and ‘nice to have’ projects.

“We also follow conservative forecasting model for any revenue, so next year, we’re forecasting a zero percent increase in total revenue that’s coming in,” Waller said. “We’re anticipating that there’s a little bit of inflation as well as a decrease in sales tax, so we’re seeing a net impact of zero.”

The total proposed budget is nearly $54.65 million. Last year’s budget was nearly $43.7 million. 

“With the proposed budget, it handles both a wage and health insurance increase, this year our health insurance costs are going up nine percent, which when looking at other jurisdictions, is actually fairly reasonable,” Waller said. “So we’re going to maintain the current split we have with staff, so staff will be paying a little bit more.”

Projected spending deficits come out to nearly $7.56 million and estimated reserves come out to nearly $45.6 million. 

“The city of Rifle is in a very sound, financial place,” Waller said. 

Councilor Alicia Gresley asked if the deficit includes the grant funding they receive. 

“It depends, our engineer is very good at knowing what sort of grant funding he’s going to be getting as he moves forward with projects, so a lot of the street projects do include that,” Waller said. “The Parks and Rec, Birch Park project that didn’t include the grant funding revenue but it did include some of the city expenditure, so it depends.”

Rust added that it’s based on assurance they have depending on the grant and the project. 

“I would like to point out that most of our funds are very healthy, but our street fund is not that healthy,” said councilor Clint Hostettler, which Waller confirmed. 

Waller said that even though they capture a lot of money through funding, next year they’ll have to start figuring out the decisions they’ll make on how to get money to the street funds. 

The only two funds that have some problems are streets and sanitation. 

All council members moved to approve the 2024 proposed budget except Mayor Sean Strode as he wasn’t present at this meeting.