The ledger of St. Louis is bleeding numbers into the black, with the city ending its fiscal year 2024 holding a budget surplus to the tune of $42.4 million. In fiscal terms, think of it not so much as an unexpected windfall, but as a calculative turning of the tide post-pandemic. This fiscal uptick was made public by Comptroller Darlene Green, as announced on the City of St. Louis website yesterday, placing the Gateway to the West in a comfortable fiscal position that few cities find themselves in these days.
According to the Comptroller's office, the surplus emerged from a fiscal brew where revenues ran approximately 14.6% over their play-it-safe projections and where conservatively forecasted expenditures were bested, having come in around 29.6% lower than bureaucrats had originally crunched into their budget spreadsheets. Green's analysis suggests that St. Louis's fiscal discipline and the drop in staffing levels, likely a hangover from the days when a virus was a primary budget line, have played their part in this outcome, and it's an outcome worth noting because the city’s general fund revenue overall nudged up by just 1.4% from the previous fiscal year.
What’s to be done with such unforeseen fiscal fruit? St. Louis, bound by the purview of its ordinances, is splitting it straight down the middle. A healthy $21.2 million is heading towards the Capital Fund, set to fund improvements across the city’s veins and capillaries of infrastructure. Meanwhile, the rest is to bolster the city's unrestricted general fund reserve which, per Comptroller Green's words on the City of St. Louis website, now "exceeds the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) recommended minimum balance of 16.7% of the operating budget."
