BURLINGTON — The City Council unanimously approved a $107.1 million budget Wednesday for the 2025-26 fiscal year, closing a nearly $10 million gap through workforce reductions, new investments and a municipal tax increase.
The new budget also addresses a $1.8 million shortfall discovered last week by increasing municipal taxes by $115 on a $500,000 home. However, Progressive Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said the hike will be offset by a reduction in education taxes.
“This budget reflects an unwavering commitment to affordability for residents here in the city of Burlington,” Mulvaney-Stanak said Wednesday. “It contains very critical investments in key priority areas for my administration, largely community safety and housing.”
The Howard Center Street Outreach program, which provides support for people in need of mental health, addiction, housing and social services, received increased funding. The council also allocated $50,000 to support senior programming.
To balance the budget, Mulvaney-Stanak and her administration reduced the city workforce, which the mayor said grew unsustainably in the past nine years — adding 98 new full-time positions, including 37 funded with one-time money and no long-term plan to maintain them. The mayor also gave up her own cost-of-living salary increase in the next fiscal year, and her department heads won’t receive it for the first six months.
Mulvaney-Stanak mentioned inflation, cost-of-living adjustments, health care increases and possible tariffs among the challenges the council had to address to close the budget gap.
“We were able to deliver you a budget that is decreased or reduced by more than 1%. When you compare the total to fiscal year (20)25, that is pretty rare out there in government,” Mulvaney-Stanak said.
City councilors expressed appreciation for the efforts to close the budget gap and the new investments, but also expressed unease about layoffs.
Councilor Carter Neubieser, a Progressive, advanced a motion to cut $100,000 allocated to the University of Vermont Health Network, presenting data on profits and assets to show that the hospital network would have enough money to cover this expense.
Councilor Evan Litwin also presented a motion to move $7,500 from the Howard Center Street Outreach program to the Turning Point Center of Chittenden County, dedicated to addiction recovery programs.
Both motions were rejected by the rest of the councilors, who claimed these proposals required a more in-depth discussion and that it was too late to make new changes to the budget.
