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WARREN — The Warren City Council unanimously approved, with some changes, the city’s 2025-26 fiscal year budget at the council’s May 13 meeting.
“While we’ve worked diligently and responsibly on this budget, we acknowledge that no budget is ever flawless,” Council Secretary Mindy Moore said. “Unforeseen needs may arise and when they do we encourage departments to bring forward appropriation requests. As always, council will give thoughtful consideration to all reasonable proposals.”
Warren Mayor Lori Stone presented her proposed budget at an April 14 event at the Warren Community Center. Stone’s budget presentation focused on fiscal responsibility, addressing aging infrastructure, respecting the hard work of city employees and getting additional grant funding for city projects.
“Going into 2024, we can all agree that Warren’s elected leadership inherited a bit of a dysfunctional budget process,” Stone said. “Together, we worked really hard to rebuild trust, mutual respect and successfully restored this process.”
She touched on obtaining a loan from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy to replace the city’s wastewater incinerator, uses for revenue obtained from the nationwide opioid settlement and Warren’s commitment to public safety.
“All we care about is what’s in the document,” Moore said about the presentation. “Our work starts when we sit down with the department heads.”
The mayor’s budget was sent to the council, which held a series of hearings in April. In the hearings, council went over the minutiae of allocated funds with explanation from each department’s head. While the budget has been approved by council, the final budget with council’s adjustments has yet to be published by the city. It’s set to be released in early June, according to Lafferty.
“It went very well,” Moore said about the process. “This council works very well together, and it was very, very smooth. It’s a lot of work. When you’re looking at drilling down to $450 million, it’s very time-consuming.”
Councilman Jonathan Lafferty co-chairs the budget committee with Moore.
“It takes many hours of dedication outside of the meeting on a Tuesday night to pass the budget,” Lafferty said. “There are hundreds of hours behind the scenes.”
Lafferty said one goal for the current budget, following last year’s budget audit, was to get closer to realistic anticipated spending. The audit, conducted by Plante Moran, identified that Warren came $31.1 million under budget last year.
“This budget represents a concerted effort to align our anticipated spending to be closer to what we’ll actually see at the end of the fiscal year,” he said.
Lafferty said that this may result in more amendments during the year, but that it’s preferable to underspending.
In its adjustments, the council attempted to answer concerns of increased overtime spending, particularly for the city’s police and fire departments.
“To address this, we have increased their overtime allocations to more realistic levels, but we also expect concerted efforts from both departments to improve management of these costs,” she said. “In the Police Department, understaffing continues to drive excessive overtime. In the fire department, required training and daily personnel absences are contributing factors.”
The city added a new Fire Department training officer role to help mitigate the overtime issues in the department.
The city is also making efforts to improve hiring at the Police Department. Moore estimated that the department has about 30 vacancies. Stone said in her budget presentation that the city was looking to add an online portal to improve hiring in the city. Moore said the city’s appointment of Human Resources Director Jared Gajos last month should help get the vacancies filled. The city had been without a permanent HR director for a year and half, according to Moore.
Outside of police and fire, the council aimed to reduce overtime spending.
“It’s changing the culture in the city that those dollars are not always going to be there,” Lafferty said. “They shouldn’t be relied upon for day-to-day operations. Those are the exception. It’s not supposed to be the standard.”
Following the city’s changing marijuana ordinance, it’s expecting increased revenue.
“...We are anticipating $1.2 million in new revenue from licensing fees for recreational marijuana dispensaries, which is being incorporated into this budget,” Moore said.
Lafferty said this is the expected amount through the permitting and licensing of those businesses. State revenue sharing, based on the number of shops, is also a part of this figure.
The library’s budget was scaled back. Part of this was due to new positions for a library location that has not been built yet, according to Moore. Oksana Urban, the library’s current director, is set to retire. Once this happens, Moore said the positions can be revisited. Four library positions had a wage reduction from what was requested.
“There were four positions that were given a $17,000 raise and that sort of raised some red flags to me and that’s something we need to look at,” Moore said.
“The reclassification of those positions is inappropriate for an outgoing director to make sweeping changes to the organization of the library,” Lafferty said. “Those decisions should be left to the incoming director upon that person’s hiring by the (library) commission.”
Spending requests from the Tax Increment Finance Authority and Downtown Development Authority were removed, according to Lafferty.
“We zeroed out a number of their line items because we simply did not agree with the direction of or the lack of information that surrounded their requests,” he said.
