photo by: Eric Ayres

Wheeling officials conduct city business this month during a meeting in the second floor courtroom at the City-County Building downtown. From left are City Manager Robert Herron, Mayor Denny Magruder and Vice Mayor Jerry Sklavounakis.

WHEELING — The city of Wheeling’s budget for 2025-26 is notably ahead — particularly in tax revenues — at the halfway point through the current fiscal year.

Members of the Finance Committee of Wheeling City Council met last week to review and approve the December financial report — detailing the latest figures for revenues and expenditures for the most recently completed month.

December is the sixth month into the fiscal year that began on July 1 of 2025.

“The month of December represents the midway point of our fiscal year, and the general fund cash balance at the end of December was $964,000 compared to $506,000 last year, so there has been improvement in that respect,” Herron said.

“Revenues at the half-year point are at 52.7% of budget — about $874,000 ahead of the same time last year.”

Some city revenue line items that have been doing very well thus far through the fiscal year have been the Business and Occupation Tax and the Municipal Sales Tax revenues.

The B&O Tax has generated a total of $5.8 million so far, Herron noted.

“That’s a positive from a major revenue source,” he said. “Our municipal sales tax is at 55%, and we’re 50% through the year. So those are good indicators.”

In terms of expenditures halfway through the fiscal year, Wheeling is just slightly over the projected budget for expenditures at this point with 51.6% of the budget spent overall. Although the total is over budget by around 1.6%, the monthly expenditures have been trending in the right direction and have shown numbers improving since the end of the last calendar year.

“There’s been improvement from the past several months when we were running 3-to-4% ahead,” Herron said of the city’s expenditures. “The good news here is that our largest budgets – police and fire – from a personnel perspective are right in line at 50% of expenditures through 50% of the fiscal year.”

In recent years, city officials expressed concerns about tightening the budget in light of elevated expenses in the police and fire departments. Much of the increased spending was for overtime paid to cover shifts in light of several vacancies within the public safety departments. Officials have been working to fill the open positions in the police and fire departments and trim down the overtime, and they have been successful in doing so, Herron indicated.

“So that’s a positive,” he said. “You’ll recall that — particularly in the fire department — because of a large number of vacancies, we did have some overtime issues. That appears to have been corrected. So we’re in line for both police and fire, which are our two largest budgets.”

Members of the Finance Committee also recommended approval of a revision to the city’s general fund budget. Herron said this was somewhat of a mid-year cleanup of the budget based on known increases in revenues.

“All in all, we’re having a fairly decent year — a solid year thus far through six months of the fiscal year,” Herron said.