CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Charlottesville City Council will begin deciding what to do with $10,001,875.49 of surplus from the 2025 budget to be distributed in 2026 during its Tuesday night meeting.
Of that, $8.5-million is “unrestricted” and staff recommends that be allocated as it has been in recent past tradition into the CIP Contingency account in the General Fund, “as Long-Term Financial Management Policies.”
The surplus amount is far less of a percentage of 2025’s $252-million budget at 3.9% than last year’s $28-million total, with 25-million “unrestricted” that went into this year’s CIP, which calculated just over 10%.
City Finance Director Chris Cullinan acknowledged last year the goal was under 5%, and Councilors Michael Payne and Lloyd Snook urged improvement.
“We want to be conservative in terms of not making ridiculous assumptions, but I also think we can afford to be somewhat realistic in assuming a certain amount of growth in these numbers year-over-year,” Snook said at a Feb. 17 Council meeting.
Payne at the same meeting said, “Seeing that a portion of it is underspending from surpluses going to departments that anticipated not having enough money, to me, is a red flag, but something about how we’re doing those department budgets just isn’t accurate enough.”
Cullinan said at the time they do estimate conservatively, but the pandemic along with the recovery afterward has created challenges in determining what costs year-to-year are trends, and what are temporary or one-offs.
But he said they’re slowly getting better at it as the years progress.
After the $8.5-million to the CIP, Cullinan will present a recommendation of $1,464,765 going to what’s called Schools Gainsharing which is a shared city and schools fund, the total of which would go toward school projects debt service.
$24,490.54 is recommended for the Facilities Repair Fund, carried over from unspent restricted courts fees for Courthouse maintenance and construction.
$10,442.28 of unspent State Fire Grant funds are recommended to be used for qualifying expenditures.
