MIN CHC 1989-04-26 - Laserfiche WebLink

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MIZUNO: ( Inaudible. ) The budget process starts in October of every year. And we prepare a budget for the Legislature in January which is submitted to the Legislature. This is where we determine how much to ask the Legislature for in grants. This year we went to the Legislature with a budget , requesting $14 .7 million dollars . And we got $13 .4 million dollars , which we are very thankful for. And I think we' ll do very well with it. But again we don' t start this process after the. . .we find out how much money we got from Legislature. There' s another problem in that real property taxes , as far as the tax rolls , are finally completed in February. And the submission to Council is as of April 20 , when we submit to Council what are assessed evaluations are, the final numbers , which we base our tax revenues on. And that ' s kind of the timing of it . We do have a pretty good handle on that number in January as a matter of fact . The revenues from the state, as far as state grants-in-aid , is a very significant number in our budget from $7. 5 million to $13 .4 . You know, there' s a very, very hefty jump. And to predict in January what we' re going to actually receive and prepare Council , you know, prepare a budget using an estimated grant number, would be to me. . . it could be done certainly, but it would be. . . I shouldn' t say. . . meaningless , but it ' s gonna change a great deal by the time we submit the budget to Council in. . . on May 1st. JUVIK: Yeah. Well , I . . . first of all , I apologize. I didn' t mean to imply. . . I know you' re working on the budget all year long. But I guess the point was , is there any possible way to involve more public input during the formative development stage when some of these issues and priorities and so forth are being debated and factored into the proposed budget. I guess that was my concern. BETHEA: Let me ask a follow-up question on that . The budget is submitted within ten days after the Legislature. And the Council has to adopt it before the 30th day of June. So I suppose there has to be a real (inaudible) Council activity before that ; I 'm not sure what your timing is . So there really isn' t very much time. Would it be beneficial if there were a different fiscal year for example, instead of June 30th, so that you had another month to play with the. . .would that be a public benefit? MIZUNO: I think one comment I should make here is we are the last to submit our budgets to Council . I 'm referring to the different counties . And Maui submits it . . .has submitted it probably a month ago. And Oahu submitted theirs I believe in February. In the case of Maui , they had submitted a budget to Council using $7. 5 million as their grant . And they' re 264