Roanoke City Manager Valmarie Turner and city finance staff this week proposed a budget to the city council that included major cuts to staff, programming and maintenance.
Turner on Monday proposed a balanced budget of $421.5 million, which is a little over a 3% increase from the year before.
Fiscal year 2027 is expected to be the first year in recent history where expenditures outpace revenues, according to Turner’s presentation.
The proposed budget is a preliminary spending plan. The council did not take a vote on Monday, and the budget could change before final approval in May, as the General Assembly has not settled on its final budget yet. The state’s spending plan could affect local budgets depending on how it allocates money for programs.
A city spokesperson said Tuesday evening that city officials were not yet able to answer a list of questions about the budget proposal emailed by Cardinal News on Monday evening.
The following are a few of the many things to keep an eye on this budget season, as Turner and the finance staff balance an $18.9 million gap.
1. Revenue growth, while still positive, has slowed down significantly when compared to the past six years.
While the city’s revenue is still growing year over year, the rate at which it’s growing is expected to significantly slow down this year.
Roanoke showed strong revenue growth post-pandemic, with an increase of $62 million across in all tax categories between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2025, said Trinity Kaseke, the city’s budget manager.
Community budget meetings
The public will have two opportunities to speak with city staff and ask questions about the budget. Both meetings will be open-house style.
- 6:30-8 p.m. April 9 at the Williamson Road Branch Library’s community room.
- 6:30-8 p.m. April 16 at the South Roanoke United Methodist Church fellowship hall.
In the upcoming fiscal year, the city expects its smallest revenue increase in the last six years, at $6.9 million.
Roanoke has seen its real estate valuations rise over the last four years, with real estate tax assessed growth averaging 8.85% between 2022 and 2025.
This year, the assessed value percentage change was 6.55%.
The current tax rate is $1.22 per $100 of valuation, which has not changed since 2015.
Councilman Peter Volosin asked finance staff during Monday’s meeting why the city is still having to make cuts after seeing such high tax revenues in recent years. In fiscal year 2026, the city collected over $130 million in real estate taxes. In fiscal year 2027, the city expects that to increase by a little less than $10 million.
Turner said this is because each budget season, she starts with the base budget from the year before. Anything new needs to come out of increased revenue, she said.
2. The city expects to issue three years’ worth of debt in one year.
The city will issue about three years’ worth of debt — $79 million — in one year, Tanya Catron, the city’s capital improvement finance manager, said during Monday’s meeting.
In a statement emailed to Cardinal News, the city said the debt is higher than usual because $57.5 million in short-term financing needs to be converted into long-term financing. This debt was secured in 2024 to “fast-track” capital projects, the city said.
Catron said the debt was supposed to be issued previously, but due to staff turnover, that never happened. City officials did not answer emailed questions about the staff turnover or the debt.
“The projects needed to start, right, they had been approved. So fast forward, we have to basically have a larger-than-normal bond issuance to cover all those projects,” she said.
Catron said the city should have set aside more money for future debt service in anticipation of having to permanently finance its bond anticipation notes. That didn’t happen, Turner said at the meeting.
The city council must approve the debt issuances through a public hearing, which the city expects to happen over the summer.
3. Park maintenance funding is zeroed out in the budget after fiscal year 2027.
The city set aside $1.2 million in the budget for parks maintenance in the upcoming fiscal year. But according to the recommended capital improvement program, after the upcoming fiscal year, no money will be allocated to park maintenance through FY2031.
“It feels to me like we disproportionately cut parks and recreation, and we’ve done that again and again and again over the years, we chronically underfund it,” Councilman Terry McGuire said during the meeting. “It’s really problematic that so many of our parks and rec projects are being zeroed out.”
The council also learned Monday that the grass mowing schedule might also be cut in half, and multiple parks and recreation projects, including renovations to the Fishburn Mansion, were removed from the capital improvement plan. Councilwoman Evelyn Powers suggested that residents of the city’s adult detention center could cut the grass.
“I’m going to have a really hard time supporting some of this,” McGuire said of the cuts.
4. The city plans to cut about 30 positions, and freeze at least 80 more.
The city will cut 29 positions altogether, and freeze another 80 to 95 positions. It’s unclear how many of those positions are currently vacant at this point, as the city did not answer that emailed question.
Turner said because the city already has a high level of vacancies, layoffs aren’t being considered yet. “But we’re going to have to manage this budget … every single month, which may require us to shift every single month.”
The city plans to cut more than $600,000 from fleet management, which would cover rising fleet management and fuel costs.
Volosin asked what happens if fuel prices continue to rise as they have in recent weeks.
Turner said in that case, and in other cases of unexpected rises in expenditures, she would have to look at additional staffing cuts.
5. More than $50 million in projects have been removed from the capital improvement plan.
The proposed budget removes more than $50 million in projects from the city’s capital improvement plan.
These projects include upgrading Fire Station #2; expanding the Belmont Library; renovating the Fallon Park Pool, the downtown pedestrian bridge and the Martin Luther King Jr. pedestrian bridge; rehabilitating the Mill Mountain Star; and other projects.
The city also removed more than $5 million in items from its base budget, or the budget from the previous year that finance staff begins with each budget season.
These include cutting almost $300,000 from the Greater Roanoke Transit Company subsidy, cutting library program activities such as the summer reading program, and closing the Grandin location for the Youth Development team, which provides afterschool programming at three of the city’s recreation centers.
6. Public safety sees about $1.6 million in unfunded items in the new budget.
Public safety will not go untouched in this budget, even as Turner has said that it’s a top priority for the city.
Police, fire-EMS and the sheriff’s office would be among those agencies affected by the 29 proposed job cuts. Public safety departments also are expected to lose funding for overtime and temporary wages.
The sheriff’s office will lose more than $300,000 that would have increased its Virginia Retirement System multiplier, which determines an employee’s retirement benefits, to match surrounding localities.
7. The school division, like most other corners of the city, is facing cuts.
Funding for the public school division represents 26% of the city’s total operating budget, or about $108 million in the coming fiscal year, according to Monday’s presentation.
Over the past few years, changes to how the city funds its schools have led to the school division approving a preliminary budget that includes about $16 million in cuts to staff, programming, transportation and maintenance.
In January, the city council voted to change its school funding policy. While the division is still likely to receive more money this upcoming year than it did the last year, it anticipates getting less than what was expected with the earlier formula that had been in place since 2011.
The city also changed the way the school division handles its fund balance. In the past, the division held onto that money, with the understanding that it could use it as a “rainy day fund.”
At the end of the fiscal year 2024, the school division had a general fund balance, or surplus funding, of almost $23 million.
The city council approved for RCPS to use a little over $10 million of that surplus to balance the current fiscal year budget.
Tensions are high between the school board and the city council, and Mayor Joe Cobb addressed these tensions during a joint school board and city council meeting on March 16.
“I don’t always get it right, I get frustrated, we all get frustrated, and we sometimes say things that we wish we hadn’t said. So for that I apologize,” Cobb said. “But I also want to thank you all for our willingness to be here together, to work through this, and to map out some steps we can take toward reconciliation.”