Budgeting season is underway in the Copper Country. Last Night Houghton held its first budget session. City manager Erica Waara started by going over the general fund budget with councilors. He says the city will need to carefully watch spending while working with the fund’s 5/2 million dollar budget.
We’re in times where there’s not a lot of meat on the bone. The concentration is going to be, we’re going to work on maintaining what we have. We’ll do new things where we can but without any significant increases in the tax base or revenue sharing. We’re going to take care of what we got. – Eric Waara, City Manager, City of Houghton
Hough faces common community challenges with housing, and managing a sustainable tax base, while maintaining infrastructure, amenities, and services.
Living in town, there’s some security out there. We do a great job of plowing our roads. The police department takes care of the community very well. We have zoning, which means that I don’t know, a shipping container doesn’t show up in your neighbor’s yard across the street that you’re going to stare at out your dining room window, zoning. You have all those things that are the benefits of living in town. And we want to keep that. We’ve done a very good job for the last 50 years giving taxpayers a return on that investment and that confidence they’ve had in the city in living here and locating a business here. So that’s what we want to keep doing. – Eric Waara, City Manager, City of Houghton
Waara says despite the council’s feelings of uncertainty around grant opportunities from federal and state sources, the city is in a good financial place having completed many large projects.
There’s a consensus that everybody concurred, given the Washington to Lansing to Houghton to Sheldon Avenue flow of money in the government, so to speak, that with all that uncertainty out there. We’re fortunate that we’re in good financial shape and we’re going to, you know, the investments that we make in the city that keep it a nice place to live, that’s what we’re going to concentrate on. – Eric Waara, City Manager, City of Houghton
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