Palmview council adopts FY2025-26 budget, sets 0.5879 tax rate and approves $2 million GLO contract

The Palmview City Council on Monday adopted the proposed fiscal year 2025–26 budget and approved a property tax rate of 0.5879, while also voting to accept multiple grant-funded projects and related contract actions.

City Manager Michael Leo presented the budget as a product of four public workshops and described it as “a proposed budget, based on the 4 workshops that we had,” noting staff asked departments to reduce operational budgets and that the city pursued federal and state grant funding to limit tax burden. Leo said recent awards include a GLO 2019 CDBG-DR reallocation award for drainage and paving and other grants that together represent multiple millions in outside funding.

The council adopted the budget ordinance (Ordinance No. 2025-07-0) and separately adopted the tax levy ordinance (Ordinance No. 2025-08-0) by roll-call votes recorded as unanimous among the members present. The adopted tax rate of 0.5879 was presented as an 11.30% increase relative to the compressed statutory calculation used for public notice; the council also adopted the rate split of 0.1637 for debt service and 0.4242 for maintenance and operations.

Why it matters: Council and staff emphasized that outside grant awards are being used to leverage local dollars for infrastructure work—especially drainage and paving—so the city can improve streets and drainage while minimizing the local tax burden. Council members and staff also discussed the timeline and extra steps required for grant-funded projects, including engineering, bidding and possible environmental reviews.

Budget and revenue highlights - The city’s published proposed general fund revenues total about $10.7 million; Leo said roughly 35% of…