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Government

Bettendorf 2023 Budget Final Adoption

The city of Bettendorf will likely finish work on next year's budget Tuesday night. The city council is scheduled to hold a public hearing, then give its final approval.

City Administrator Decker Ploehn says the property tax rate will go down by 15 cents, but that'll be offset by rising property values and some small fee increases.

"On the average home which is now about 266,000 dollars it would mean about a 15 dollar a year tax increase, a little over a dollar a month. And with fees, it'll be a total of about 30 dollars."

The budget includes increases in sewer and stormwater fees, but no increase in the solid waste fee for most customers.

Bettendorf will also be able to hire 11 new employees, including three police officers and three firefighters. Ploehn says that's because the city will receive more money from the road use tax and sales tax because its population has grown.

"So if you gain people, you get more than what your allotment was the previous ten years. So for the next ten years we roughly got about a million and-a-half new dollars because our population numbers increased."

Bettendorf's population has increased nearly 18 per cent, or 6,000 people, during the past ten years, to 39,000.

Iowa requires city and county governments to submit their budgets to the state by March 31st each year, for the fiscal year that begins in July.

Government
A native of Detroit, Herb Trix began his radio career as a country-western disc jockey in Roswell, New Mexico (“KRSY, your superkicker in the Pecos Valley”), in 1978. After a stint at an oldies station in Topeka, Kansas (imagine getting paid to play “Louie Louie” and “Great Balls of Fire”), he wormed his way into news, first in Topeka, and then in Freeport Illinois. While a graduate student in the Public Affairs Reporting Program at the University of Illinois at Springfield (then known as Sangamon State University), he got his first taste of public radio, covering Illinois state government for WUIS. Here in the Quad Cities, Herb worked for WHBF Radio before coming to WVIK in 1987. Herb also produces the weekly public affairs feature Midwest Week – covering the news behind the news by interviewing reporters about the stories they cover.