Bossier City put forth a solid 2027 budget, despite a few dark clouds ahead, and perhaps a bit too optimistic.
This week, the City Council held a budget information session, where Chief Administrative Office Shane Cheatham presented it publicly. The plan concentrated on maintaining core services and continuation of existing ones with a 3.71 percent bump upwards in general fund spending to nearly $86 million. As it is, that increase is driven almost entirely by a predicted rise in sales tax collections.
Which might flash one sign of trouble. It forecasts that property tax revenues actually suffer a tiny decline, meaning resales of property would increase at the margin at best and bring little in the way of new higher valued property into service. In other words, this indicates stagnation economically with little upward movement in population.
Yet that shouldn’t cause undue concern because of the predicted sales tax bump – if in fact that happens. The most recent sales tax collection report has the city down 0.6 percent through August from last year the forecast for this year is nearly a million more bucks higher than last. That makes a jump to the desired level less unlikely. It’s questionable that the nearby data centers that should break ground soon will add that much more to these collections, especially as one of the new fiscal prudence ordinances will divert some of those collections to a savings fund prompted by data center arrival.
Even more worrisome, projected spending increases mainly in general government and public safety put the budget in deficit of nearly $2 million. That’s an amount easily covered by the existing fund balance, but it’s not a habit worth picking up.
Culpability behind these higher expenses comes from uncompensated state-mandated pay raises and from sharply escalating employee benefit costs and risk management insurance. The latter constitutes an own goal, courtesy of the former graybeard Council members who last year left office voluntarily or otherwise when just before their exit they muscled through a scheme of dubious legality to fund parking lots built for private citizens paying for it with that kind of insurance.
But the erosion of the general fund budget seems minor compared to that of the city’s enterprise funds, specifically water and sewerage. So far this year utility revenues are flat and expenses up 12 percent, leading after debt service to income falling by half to just over $1 million. The rolling replacement of water meters might by leading to lower revenues than the previous estimated usage that even a pair of increases in water rates over the past couple of years doesn’t seem to have helped with debt service gnawing away at balances for now.
However, the sewerage system is much worse off. Rates weren’t increased recently, and for the 2027 budget the forecast expenditures would exceed revenues by about $5 million or nearly 25 percent. Ideally, enterprise operations should self-sustain but the city can step in and redirect from other funding mechanisms to prop up sewerage, and given that at the end of 2025 the dedicated fund for sewerage operations had only about $6 million in reserve not already tied to debt service and so far this year revenues are down 2 percent and expenses up 16 percent, a bailout may have to happen during next year unless the city increases these rates as well.
This budget does well with what it has, but the warning signs can’t help but attract attention. A lot of spilt milk with free spending on unneeded or low-return capital items over the past three decades continuing to haunt the city, sucking revenues away from other priorities or tax relief that would promote growth that also with increased customers would end up alleviating pressure on enterprise funds. As a result, the current crop of councilors wasn’t dealt the best hand, but they’ll have to play it the best they can.
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