Meadville

Challenges: Anticipated 40 percent increase in insurance premiums; new contracts with firefighters and streets workers call for 3 percent increase; negotiation for new police contract underway; road salt prices up about $15 a ton.

Where it might go: Expected to end year with $56,000 surplus; too soon to tell if there won’t be a property tax increase.

The 2008 budget approved by Meadville City Council in late 2007 included expenditures totaling $8.87 million, up 3.35 percent from 2007’s expenditures of $8.56 million, but city residents dodged the tax-increase bullet for the third consecutive year. At this point in time, the city’s finance director, Tim Groves, anticipates there will be a $56,000 surplus at the end of the current year.

The city’s property-tax rate remained at 19.42 mills for 2008, leaving the owner of a home with the median assessed value in the city of $25,000 with a bill of $485 for the third year.

Members of Meadville City Council will get their first glimpse of their 2009 budget during their regularly-scheduled study session on Nov. 5. A schedule for additional budget sessions has not yet been established.

An estimated 40-percent increase in the city’s health insurance premium has city officials in negotiations with Highmark, the city’s current provider, while their insurance broker checks with other carriers, Groves said during a recent interview. Recently-signed contracts with the city’s firefighters and street workers will add 3-percent pay hikes to the budget, while talks with the city’s police department remain under way. “With almost 70 percent of our costs personnel-related, those kinds of things drive our budget,” Groves said.

And while the cost of salt for the city’s streets is expected to rise from $34.95 to $49.95 a ton, costing the city an additional $38,000 in 2009, and everyone is waiting to see what happens with gasoline and diesel prices as well as the cost of gas and electric utilities, reimbursement the city receives from the state’s liquid fuel fund and for other street-related expenses is falling.

No one is making any projections about what the 2009 bottom line may be; however, if the nation’s municipal bond market fails to improve during coming months, major infrastructure improvements — including repairing streets and bridges and purchasing new trucks and cars, for example — will just have to wait.

Vernon Township

Challenges: Anticipated 30 percent increase in insurance premiums; realty transfer tax revenue is, so far, lower than anticipated.

Where it might go: Spending cuts anticipated; too so to tell if there won’t be a property tax increase.