PEORIA, Ill. – The Peoria City Council meeting on Tuesday was week two discussing the 2020-2021 budget.
The meeting did not come to any definite decisions, but just questions the council had for City Manager Patrick Urich.
Urich said that the previous budget did a lot of heavy lifting with head count reductions and furloughs.
“As we moved into this budget this year, while we still had some significant adjustments that we had to make, a lot of really tough decisions were made,” Urich said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re out of the woods when it comes to our long term planning for the city.”
Urich said that when the Public Safety Pension fee falls off in 2022, significant adjustments will need to be made to the budget.
One goal the council has according to Urich is to reduce the superfluous calls the Peoria Fire Department goes on.
“That is something that when we did implement the first phase in the Fitch study, we started to look at how we would work with sending resources out either from the fire department or AMT,” Urich said.
Last year, the City Council hired consultants from Fitch and Associates to help determine the best ways to use AMT and the fire department.
Urich said after looking at over a thousand medical codes that are sent out, they are working with AMT to see who can respond first.
“Whether that’s going to be the city or whether that’s going to be AMT, and how fast are we going to respond to those calls. As part of that, we’ve looked at it, and identified about 15 percent of the calls the city can reduce,” Urich said.
Urich said next week will bring forth ordinances the council must decide on.
“If there’s not a lot of major questions, the council will tie this budget up by November 5,” Urich said.
