Cheyenne Mayor Opposes Budget Proposal

Cheyenne Mayor Rick Kaysen is coming out against a proposal to require most city departments to submit spending estimates for the upcoming fiscal year in February.

The resolution, sponsored by councilman Dicky Shanor, passed the council finance committee on Monday and now goes before the full city council. Shanor says his proposal would give the full council information and input on the formulation of the budget.

But Kaysen says the picture that would be presented is incomplete, since it would only detail spending proposals without information on available revenues. The mayor says that information typically becomes available sometime in March. He also says compiling the spending estimates would present an extra workload for city staff, and that spending estimates at that point would be ''weak"

Shanor's proposal would apply to all city department's except the fire department, which is the only division of city government that has a collective bargaining agreement with the city. Cheyenne's fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30th, and the council  takes up the mayor's proposed budget for final review in June