POUGHKEEPSIE – City of Poughkeepsie Mayor Rob Rolison announced that his 2020 preliminary budget lowers the city’s homestead tax rate and also lowers the non-homestead tax rate. The City’s tax levy increases from $24,057,546 to $24,495,525, or 1.82 percent, marking the third consecutive year the City has stayed under the New York State tax cap.
The spending plan for next year recognizes a sharp drop in the City’s debt service costs of more than $1million, after the adoption of a formal debt management plan in 2017 and a bond refunding transaction that occurred earlier this year.
Mayor Rolison said, “The budget I am sending to the Common Council today for their approval continues our multi-year plan to make our local government more efficient while increasing our capacity to deliver on our promise to improve services to our residents and local businesses.”
The last time the City lowered the tax rates was in 2009.
The City’s budget funds a new position of Deputy Fire Chief to support the safety-inspection and training functions, restores maintenance and service agreements with various vendors that had been cut in years past, accounts for all contractual increases and collective bargaining commitments and increases funding for youth services. The spending proposal also calls for security upgrades at municipal buildings, as well as data security and IT upgrades which will support a new “continuity and disaster recovery plan” to be formalized next year, and the replacement of an aging tax collection system that was installed in the early 1990s.
The budget makes no change to water, sewer or sanitation rates.
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