Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
The Yelm City Council unanimously approved three amendments to the city’s biennial budget during a Yelm City Council meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 9, following a brief presentation from Stephanie Nanavich, finance director.
Nanavich held two other hearings regarding the 2025-26 biennial budget amendments during council meetings on Tuesday, Nov. 11, and on Tuesday, Nov. 25. The third and final hearing came during the Tuesday, Dec. 9, meeting.
The amendments in the midbiennial budget come as Yelm closes out fiscal year 2025, with management continuously monitoring “year-end expenditures” to ensure they’re less than or equal to budget appropriations. Three items were caught during the review and required adjustments to appropriations.
The items include:
Item one: Sewer utility fund expenditure of $179,550 for public and city utility taxes
Item two: Water utility fund expenditure of $157,187 for media for southwest well
Item three: General Fund revenue and expenditure of $360,932 for school and fire impact fees
Nanavich thoroughly explained the purposes to each of the items included as biennial budget amendments to council and those in attendance.
“We have just three changes to the 2025 budget,” Nanavich said. “The first one, in the sewer utility fund, all of our utilities pay public and city utility taxes. We just underestimated the amount of taxes and so we’re just shoring up our numbers to match what we’ve had to pay.”
Nanavich said the second line item, in relation to the southwest well, was from the water utility fund and used to purchase a filter known as a media.
“The first piece of that capital came in this year instead of next year, so we just need to align the budget with the actual expenditure,” she said. “We had planned to purchase that capital item for that well project.”
The third item, according to Nanavich, involved the permitting process. She noted that Yelm collects and redistributes the impact fees that are distributed to school and fire districts.
“We collect those and we pass those straight to those districts,” Nanavich said. “The amount that we estimated we’d be bringing in came up much higher than what we actually estimated. What we brought in was more than what we estimated, so we’re shoring up those numbers as well. Again, those are strictly passed through.”
To learn more about the City of Yelm’s budgets, visit the link https://tinyurl.com/YelmBudgets.
