by Jonathan Haller

Middletown's City Manager, Judy Gilleland hopes to spend the bulk of the work session at next week’s meeting discussing the city budget. She and city staff have been meeting to formulate a plan to reduce Middletown City expenditures by $3.7M by the end of 2012.  

In keeping with Council guidelines, Ms. Gilleland apportioned the reductions to be 29% from non-public safety budgets and 71% from the public safety budgets. 

This translates to a total reduction of $3.7M, $1.1M for non public safety general fund budgets and $2.6M for public safety general fund budgets. 

"While these reductions have been difficult to discuss, city staff members and department heads have all worked very well together to solve the issue.

In addition, we need to determine if we are going to place the Public Safety levy on the ballot in November of this year.  If so we will need to take steps in the near future to do so, otherwise, we will wait until spring of 2012.  The current levy expires December 2012".  - Judy Gilleland