Troy Mayor Carmella Mantello has presented her 2025 budget to the Republican-controlled city council. But Tuesday’s presentation came as the city remains without a fulltime comptroller.
The Republican says her first budget, a more than $117 million proposal, is conservative and innovative. Although a garbage fee she has pledged to repeal remains in this year’s spending plan, the first-term mayor says the city is not raising it while studying how to remove it.
Mantello says the fee accounts for more than $3 million in revenue and needs to be phased out rather than scrapped.
“It's not going to happen overnight; we know, it’s a $3.2 million revenue,” Mantello said. “You can't just shift that over to the to the General Fund, obviously. So, for us to keep that at zero, fabulous, another tremendous, tremendous result, and we plan next year to do a citywide assessment on the barrels.”
Mantello says some families received too many barrels and the assessment will correct the distribution.
Mantello says the budget includes large increases in costs for materials and services like office supplies and contractors and state mandates such as pensions, healthcare, and debt services.
The budget, if approved, would have one of the city’s lowest tax increases in recent years of 1.89 percent — under the state tax cap.
Mantello presented the budget alongside members of her administration, including Gabrielle Mahoney, the city’s Chief Account Clerk, who has taken on some of the comptroller’s role as the city races to refill the position.
Dylan Spring, who was hired as comptroller February, resigned in July under mounting pressure to deliver quarterly financial reports and close the 2023 books.
Before that, outside firm ProNexus was brought on while the city searched for a full-time comptroller. The firm worked through Spring’s resignation, but it was announced in August that ProNexus failed to file an accurate report on the city’s 2023 finances, submitting inaccurate documents to the state.
While the city races to fill the comptroller position, it has hired yet another outside accounting firm, BST & Co.
Council President Sue Steele has continually expressed concern in recent months over the state of city finances. Steele says without quarterly financial reports, the administration can’t be sure the city is in good standing. Steele contends the budget, which was delivered to the council literally at the 11th hour, was late as it was not delivered by close of business.
“This is frustrating in some respects; I understand the circumstances that we've been under,” Steele said. “I commend the staff for stepping up and doing all that you have been doing, but I have to say, personally and not politically. This was very frustrating to receive this budget moments before midnight and to receive it only in electronic format. This was a deviation from the past. It's not what we have come to expect in the city of Troy. We can blame all we want, but it's a fact of life, and it was extremely difficult over the weekend to scroll a document that was not searchable. In the past, the document budget was searchable. There was no index, so we couldn't even find what page if we're looking for a particular department, we couldn't find that.”
Mantello dismisses the idea that the budget was late. She says given the circumstances, it was a “herculean effort” to get it in. Mantello calls Steele’s comments misleading.
“You pick and choose your battles, but you have to be honest with people, and to say that this process is not transparent. We're here for three hours,” Mantello said. “We're going to be here tomorrow for another three to four hours, we're going to go line by line. We'll stay and we were we would have stayed longer this evening. If they wanted to go through more revenues, we would have kept BST here. I mean, this is very open, and I have to tell you, that is very insulting, because I really pride ourselves on getting back to people being responsive, being open and being transparent.”
Council President Pro Temp Thomas Casey, a Republican, says without a comptroller, he understands it was a tough process to get a fair budget together.
“It's just a bad situation. It's always been,” Casey said. “There's been so much heat for not having quarterly reports, but we had no comptroller. We certainly couldn't shut the city down either.”
The council and members of the administration will meet weekly as budget negotiations continue. The budget is due December 1st.
