Members of the Montgomery City Council passed the largest budget in City history for fiscal year 2026 on Tuesday.
However, a push by some on the city council to have more input on how fallout, or leftover, funds from the almost completed fiscal year 2025 budget failed.
The effort was opposed by Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, who said in a statement on Tuesday, “I created discretionary funding for City Council members because I believed it was important for them to have tools to meet the needs of their districts. But we must be responsible with taxpayer dollars. The idea of several million dollars in new discretionary spending was never raised in budget hearings, where these conversations belong. We cannot compromise the City’s reserves, bond rating, or financial stability for requests that were not planned for. Our job is to manage public resources in a way that protects Montgomery’s future.”
Montgomery City Councilman Ed Grimes defended his proposal as a good government measure in a recent interview with 1819 News.
“I wanted the city council to have a say in where that money went, whether we got any of it or not. I wanted to have a say in what we did. We’ve moved $114 million of what they call unspent money, fallout money, into a special projects account, and we’ve had no money into where that money was spent, none at all,” Grimes said. “In the days gone by, they’ve always voted it this way, amended the previous year in the new one, but until recent years, they’d been more fully staffed. They just didn’t have millions and millions of dollars unspent. I think that’s a two-fold problem. With inflation, sales tax income has probably gone up two or three percent just due to inflation, and we’ve just been way short in certain departments. We’d have loved to see some more money going to road paving and those sorts of things.”
He continued, “We never knew where any of that project money went until the last meeting, the chief financial officer gave somebody on the council a list of $50 million that they spent in ‘24. Nobody had time to review where that money went or where it didn’t go. We have no input on where the money goes. I understand a lot of it is deferred maintenance on buildings, roofs, and equipment that’s needed, those sort of things, but we would like to have input. I think to be good government, we need to have input in that.”
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