Wilmette trustees approved the village’s 2015 property-tax levy, the last building block in Wilmette’s annual financial plan, when they met Dec. 8.
The action was taken the same night the board cut portions of the levy originally intended to help pay back bond debt and the same night trustees congratulated Wilmette’s finance director for winning a financial reporting award.
Trustees approved the $16.6 million levy with few comments, after a brief public hearing at which no one spoke. The levy, which is slightly more than $530,000 higher than its 2014 predecessor, “is really the final administrative action on the budget,” finance committee head Carol Ducommun said when she introduced the levy, which officials said comprises roughly 36 percent of the village’s $36.8 million general operating budget.
An estimated $3.4 million of the levy was set to pay off bond sale debt.
That was the amount remaining after trustees abated an additional roughly $4.9 million in debt service levy that originally was set to pay off segments of six general obligation bonds from 2002, 2009, 2013 and 2014.
The village is required by law to levy property taxes to pay off bond debt, Finance Director Melinda Molloy explained in a report to the board. But if the village plans to pay off any of that debt with non-property tax revenue such as water or sewer revenue – as the village has done this year – then it’s required to lower, or abate, the bond debt levy by the same amount, she stated in the report. The same holds true when the village refinances bond debt, she said.
“We abate the bond levy so that we don’t double collect for that debt,” Village President Bob Bielinski said.
Before trustees passed the levy, they congratulated Molloy and her staff for winning a prize for excellence in financial reporting from the Government Finance Officers Association.
Wilmette’s financial staff must present its annual audit to the association, which serves thousands of government finance officials nationally, each year for consideration before receiving the certificate of excellence, Molloy said.
“It involves a lot of staff time and involves guidance from the manager’s office, so it is definitely a team effort,” she said.
Molloy estimated that Wilmette has won the award annually for the last 15 to 20 years, a record of which Village President Bob Bielinski approved.
“That’s wonderful. I think it’s consistent with the way village staff runs the village,” he said.
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