The Redmond City Council adopted the City’s 2023-2024 biennial budget on Dec. 6, with a 6-1 vote. The preliminary budget is available at redmond.gov/Budget, and the final adopted budget book will be released in the first quarter of 2023.
“This new budget prioritizes delivering high-quality services to the community, assisting our most vulnerable populations, maintaining the City’s investment in infrastructure, and envisioning the future needs of a growing, vital, and sustainable community,” said Mayor Angela Birney. “The budget represents months of hard work and input from community members, staff, and City Council.”
“Throughout the yearlong process, we listened as many Redmond residents shared the wide range of programs and policies they cared about most,” City Council President Jessica Forsythe said. “Council collaborated with the Mayor and City leadership to ensure we addressed these issues and that the community’s voice is represented in the adopted budget. I’m incredibly proud of the work we all accomplished together.”
Some notable allocations of Redmond’s 2023-2024 biennial budget include:
– Investing additional resources in affordable housing ($10 million) and human services ($2 million).
– Promoting equity and inclusivity through training, translation services, welcoming events, and staffing ($663,000).
– Protecting the environment through wildlife habitat planning and volunteer planting events, such as Green Redmond Partnership ($50,000) and volunteer planting events and invasive species removal ($122,000).
– Bringing the community together through garden plots ($77,500), pop-up dog parks ($102,000), and community events ($582,000).
– Adding two program coordinators ($359,629) and one maintenance technician ($196,364) to support operations at the new Redmond Senior & Community Center.
– Continuing implementation of the Environmental Sustainability Action Plan ($825,000), including clean building programming, building efficiency and decarbonization, and waste diversion.
– Investing in consulting services for pedestrian, bicycle, and multimodal policies and strategies ($200,000).
– Funding two community care coordinators ($460,145) to respond to calls in which mental health assistance is more suitable than armed Police response.
– Supporting small business grants ($800,000) through nonprofit organizations helping small businesses, including small business advice, marketing, planning, and translation services.
– Support network security enhancements ($120,000) for the safety of city data and invest in audio-visual infrastructure and homeless outreach case management software ($1.17 million).
Throughout the budget-writing process, the city says it gathered community input about community issues, priorities, and fiscal matters before the final budget was adopted. Community members provided input through questionnaires, emails, focus groups, five public hearings, and speaking at Items from the audience during council’s regular business meetings.
