As Tuscaloosa slowly crawls back to a post-pandemic world, Mayor Walt Maddox has proposed a $6.6 million spending plan from the city’s yearly budget surplus.
Last year, the City Council took a more hesitant approach toward the annual surplus spending, electing to hold off on much of the spending proposal put together by city engineers until the world regained some sense of normalcy.
Since then, all of the $6.8 million in projects eventually was approved and completed, City Hall said, but this year there appears to be not as much hesitation, despite a lack of Water and Sewer Fund reserves.
On Tuesday, Maddox informed the council’s finance committee that the Water and Sewer Fund had lost millions – about $4 million, based on city finance records – in fiscal 2020, due largely to a loss in industrial-level water usage that officials said was unexpected.