Photo by Eric Ayres Wheeling Vice Mayor Jerry Sklavounakis discusses city expenses during Monday's meeting of the Finance Committee of Council.

WHEELING – Officials in the city of Wheeling approved a significant revision to the 2025-26 budget as the fiscal year winds to a close over the next two weeks.

Although the city will end the fiscal year with a balanced budget, concerns were raised over the fact that the Wheeling Fire Department and Wheeling Police Department are projected to end the fiscal year over budget by a total of $1.8 million from originally projected figures for their annual expenses. Other departments ended under budget, and city officials were able to balance the overall figures for revenues and expenditures before closing out the year.

Members of Wheeling City Council held their meeting one day earlier than usual on Monday in order to submit the final budget revision to the West Virginia state auditor’s office by the deadline later that afternoon. The current fiscal year ends on June 30.

The Finance Committee of council met prior to Monday’s regular council meeting to discuss the city’s May financial report and to review the proposed year-end budget revisions. Council members indicated the proposed revisions were distributed to them during the Finance Committee meeting.

“There are some departments that we believe are going to be over budget and under budget,” Wheeling City Manager Robert Herron said. “So the budget revision takes that into account as kind of an annual cleanup of the budget at the end of the fiscal year.”

During monthly financial reviews over the past several months, officials noted that revenues in the city have been strong – particularly sales tax revenues and business and occupation tax revenues. However, those solid months of tax collections will not result in a need to adjust the budget on that side of the ledger.

“There is no proposed increase in revenues,” Herron said, noting that the current month is not expected to move the needle much as the fiscal year comes to a close. “June is typically a slow revenue month.”

Herron said June is typically the second slowest month of the year for the city in terms of revenues, with December being the slowest month.

Heading into the final month of the fiscal year, the city’s overall expenditures are slightly ahead, Herron added.

For the fiscal year 2025-26 budget revision, an adjustment is being made to $334,500 in expenditure line items for city departments to bring the overall city budget back into balance at year’s end.

“The finance director, along with myself, has gone through each individual budget and has recommended changes, which create additions to some budgets and reductions to other budgets based on where we are at the end of the fiscal year,” Herron explained.

Wheeling Vice Mayor Jerry Sklavounakis questioned the departmental increases that stood out on the budget revision breakdown – specifically some significant increases for the city’s public safety departments.

“There’s an $800,000 increase for the police department and $1 million for the fire department?” Sklavounakis asked.

Herron explained that the adjustments to the police department are “a little misleading,” as more than half of the total are costs associated with reimbursements, including costs for school resource officers. There are also charges for insurance that were not included in the original budget for the police department, Herron said.

For the fire department, the city manager noted that there have been a number of recent retirements of veteran employees, creating costs related to turnover and extra efforts made to bring new employees on board.

“We’ve had a number of retirements,” Herron said of the fire department expenses. “We currently have eight employees in training, which has created overtime, and we have three more coming on board within the next couple of weeks.”

Sklavounakis noted that in the past, the police and fire departments had been experiencing overtime issues because of vacancies on their staffs, resulting in existing employees working overtime in order to cover shifts. Over the last several months, however, council members had been informed that the overtime issues had been brought under control as many of those vacancies in the safety departments had been filled.

As the fiscal year closes, however, the additional expenses for overtime issues have again created concerns.

“It’s just the fact that those budgets have just been expensive this year. The overtime was doing really well until the last couple of months,” Herron said, attributing it primarily to retirements. “The fact that those budgets are over budget is a concern. I have spoken with the two chiefs at length about that. I think that they understand that we’ve got some ways in which we’re going to address that.”

The adjustments to the police and fire department budgets for the current fiscal year bring them closer in line to the figures budgeted for those departments for the upcoming 2026-27 fiscal year, which begins on July 1. The overall increase for both departments in the next fiscal year totals around $1,127,000, with the fire department’s budget increasing by an overall total of around $100,700 next year and the police department budget for 2026-27 increasing by $1,026,259.

There were several notable decreases to the city budget for the current fiscal year, as well. As reflected in the budget revision, there was a $1,193,000 decrease to the streets and highways budget, $385,000 decrease to playgrounds, $250,000 reduction to the garbage department, $270,000 decrease to the finance office, $95,000 reduction to planning and zoning, $75,000 reduction to the visitors bureau budget, $50,000 decrease to engineering, $40,000 decrease to the city manager’s office and a $5,000 reduction to the city clerk’s budget.

In addition to the increases to the Wheeling Fire and Police Department budget for the current fiscal year, the budget revision which was approved by council on Monday included increases to the following departments: $240,000 to the recycling center, $105,000 to public transit, $65,000 to the police judge’s office, $45,000 for general government, $30,000 to parks and recreation, $30,000 to the personnel office, $10,000 to the communication center/central dispatch, $7,500 to the Centre Market house, $75,000 to data processing, $6,000 to city council, $1,000 to the mayor’s office and $1,000 to the Regional Development Authority.

Councilman Dave Palmer, chairman of the Wheeling City Council Finance Committee, noted that the latest financial report also showed that only about 60 percent of the city’s fire protection fees for the fiscal year had been collected so far, according to the May financial report.

“We’re having a software issue,” Wheeling Finance Director Nathan Greene said. “We’re working with the software provider to get those bills re-created, printed and mailed out as soon as possible.”

The city’s budget stabilization fund remains strong with $5,611,000 in the coffers. Officials indicated there was no need to dip into the fund in order to balance the current fiscal year’s budget as they close the books on 2025-26. The city’s cash balance at the end of May was “pretty healthy” at $1.9 million.

Officials commended the city administration and finance department for their work to keep the city’s revenues and expenditures balanced.

“I think it’s a good job by you all,” Sklavounakis said.