By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

Pflugerville City Council made preliminary arrangements at Tuesday’s meeting to approve the Fiscal Year 2011 budget Sept. 14 after a public hearing at City Hall.

A survey of budget projections for Central Texas cities, conducted by the city of Pflugerville’s finance department, found that Pflugerville is the only city in the region that plans to lower its tax rate in the coming year.

“Leander is proposing a five-cent increase on their property tax. Kyle is proposing a three-cent increase. Several cities are just leaving their rate where it is – San Marcos, Kerrville, Georgetown,” city Finance Director Beth Davis said.

The city’s long-term goal of dropping the property tax rate by 0.5 cents each year will stay on track with this year’s half-cent cut slated to come as scheduled.

Councilman Wayne Cooper said he works with several cities professionally as a landscape architect and many of those cities are laying off staff and cutting programs to balance their 2011 budgets.

“I know there’s a perception here that we’re cutting to bare bones and stuff, but good gosh guys, we’re not cutting nearly as deep as a lot of cities are.”

He said he knew of another Central Texas city that plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its staff in the next month.

Councilman Darelle White said the city’s ability to continue lowering taxes can be attributed to its ultra-conservative use of funds. Mayor Jeff Coleman agreed.

“I hope our citizens are excited and proud of the fact that we are not using this as an opportunity to fund something just because nobody’s going to notice – just because we can – because everybody else is. I’m not saying any of these other organizations are, but if we had done that, that’s what we would have been doing, because we were being run well,” Coleman said. “Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we’ll finalize this thing and move on down the road with it.”

jrincon@pflugervillepflag.com