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City Council Members View Preliminary 2018-19 Budget

City of Wichita

Wichita City Council members got a look Tuesday at a very preliminary version of the 2018-19 budget.

City Manager Robert Layton said there are some balancing issues in the new budget that will be hard to address.

“This is one of the most difficult budgets that we’ve had in the 8 years I’ve been here," he said. "And that's pretty hard to say since we went through some pretty tough years during the recession."

He says the city is funding a 21st century operation with 20th century revenues. Local sales taxes have been hurt in the past couple of years because of an increase in online shopping, and revenues brought in from fees on natural gas tend to fluctuate due to commodity prices.

Layton says the city needs to review what its core functions are and what should be funded.

The operating budget will be presented at District Advisory Board meetings across Wichita next month. There will be three public hearings on the budget before the council votes on Aug. 8.

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Nadya Faulx is KMUW's Digital News Editor and Reporter, which means she splits her time between working on-air and working online, managing news on KMUW.org, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. She joined KMUW in 2015 after working for a newspaper in western North Dakota. Before that she was a diversity intern at NPR in Washington, D.C.