City of York holds meeting to discuss financial shortfall

The city of York is in some financial trouble.

Officials held a public meeting tonight to get some public input.

The city needs to find more than a million dollars to cut from the budget.

If they can’t do it, consequences will follow.

"We didn’t pay any attention to our checking account, and in the mean time we threw away our retirement for the time being," said City council president Barry Redfern.

Hundreds of concerned citizens came together with city leaders to brainstorm ideas to save the budget.

Mayor Orval Stahr announced that all of the city’s unrestricted budget reserves have been spent.

"Basically what has happened is through the years, in particular over the last 5 or 6 years, the increase in the city’s budget has outpaced revenue for the upcoming year."

The budget problems seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere, but officials say the problems have been festering for years.

"We have been overspending, we have spent too much money in York and the city has become the place where everyone went to get money, so every year if you go back through the last six budgets, we keep spending more," said Redfern.

York city officials took an hour of Q and A with the public, who expressed their levels of concern, and gave some ideas as to what areas they’d like to see get cut.

"if I overdraft my checking account, I don’t ask everybody else to fix it for me," said a concerned citizen.

If the budget can’t be redone the way it needs to be, some of the consequences could be rising property taxes, frozen wages and no new bonuses for city employees.

City council president Barry Redfern thinks the problem is much more than using the budget more efficiently.

"The reality of the situation in my mind, is even if we find several hundred thousand or even a million dollars in reserves that we pay for things that money that would come back in, it doesn’t change the problem that we have."

No action was taken tonight. There will be more meetings in the upcoming weeks to help leaders decide what to do.