Schenectady Mayor Gary McCarthy is proposing a 2027 city budget that would hike the tax levy by $14.6 million, or 42.8%.
The budget plan calls for increasing the levy to $48,435,365 from $33,909,068 to help pay for a budget with $124.4 million in total revenues – a 3.7% increase in spending over the 2026 budget.
“It was an extremely difficult budget process, to prepare it,” McCarthy said in an interview on Friday. “But Schenectady has done a good job over, really, the last decade of managing our tax levy, and it’s been at the low end of it. But in the past, we have used fund balance and we have used (American Rescue Plan Act) money to offset those expenses. Those funds are no longer available.”
After staying between $12.77 and $13.58 per $1,000 of assessed property value from 2017-2026, the 2027 budget proposal would raise the tax rate to $19.36 per $1,000 in assessed value, according to the budget proposal.
The mayor said the city this year do not have any fund balance and ARPA money to apply to the budget. The city faces a $15 million deficit, he said.
“We have what everybody is experiencing, is just an increase in general cost. And so that has, unfortunately, translated into a substantial tax increase for the city of Schenectady,” he said.
Source: spectrumlocalnews.com
