The Cranston City Council has adopted the budget for fiscal year that begins July 1. In it, the council passed a new amendment to raise the tax levy to the city cap of 3% from a previous 2.57% above the current year’s tax levy.

A tax levy is the amount of revenue a city or town generates from property tax.

At last week’s special City Council meeting, council members met to discuss and approve the proposed budget presented by Mayor Kenneth Hopkins earlier this month.

Hopkins’ proposal was fundamentally accepted. With a budget of more than $300 million, just over $300,000 worth of amendments were made.

The change in the tax levy may affect the predicted tax rate that was initially proposed in Hopkins’ budget, which had a tax rate of 13.96 per thousand of value for residential and 20.94 per thousand of value for commercial.

According to Finance Director Thomas Zidelis, what that change may mean remains to be seen as they calculate and finalize property valuations in the city, but he says there may be some additional increase to values based upon some recent filings.

Chief of Staff Anthony Moretti says the mayor was fundamentally pleased with the results of the budgeting.

“The mayor's objective with the budget was to provide as much funding for the schools – as much as the taxpayers could afford, because the schools were under strong fiscal challenge this year,” Moretti said. “The end result of this budget has achieved the proper balance of school funding and providing the taxpayers with affordable city service."

To get more funding for the schools, an additional $357,537 was allocated by the council through the increase in the tax levy and $15,000 through some amendments to the budget, bringing the total of additional money to the schools to $372,537.

City Council finance committee chair Dan Wall says he is pleased to get as far as the council did but wishes they could have done more. Still, Wall said, this is by far the largest increase he knows of in the city’s appropriation to the schools.  

“We did what we could in the parameters of the state law and also charter provisions,” Wall said. “Every member on the committee scrutinized over those line items. It was a bipartisan effort on both sides.”

Earlier this year, the School Department had asked for $103 million. The city’s proposed budget proposed $101 million for the schools, about $1.7 million less than school officials had sought.

The additional funding from the council will bring the gap down to about $1.3 million. Joe Balducci, chief financial officer for the Cranston Public Schools, says this is heading in the right direction but remains a wait-and-see game with state funding.

When Gov. Dan McKee presented his budget at the start of the year, Balducci said, he saw an increase in state aid to the schools.

With budget adoption for the state aimed for June, Balducci said they must wait and see what the General Assembly will provide in the final state budget.

“At this point, the only piece of the puzzle that remains unknown is what the state is going to do," Balducci said.