Carmella filed the 2025 budget seven minutes before the legal deadline. Corrected materials arrived almost an hour after it. Troy had no permanent comptroller. The city had been paying outside accounting firms more than $260,000 to keep the books.
Council President Steele, along with Council Members Vera and Spain-McLaren, said the timing “falls far short of the level of transparency that taxpayers deserve.”
On December 2, the Republican majority passed the budget 4-3.
The Books Behind the Budget
At the October 15, 2024 special budget meeting, BST, the accounting firm the city brought in to reconstruct its finances, explained what it took to get the books into workable condition.
The problem started with KVS, the city’s financial software. BST described it as so outdated that accounting professionals compare it to Windows 95. The system runs as two separate systems: one where transactions are entered, and a second where those transactions must be manually processed. Because the process is manual and sequential, entries regularly landed in wrong accounts or wrong funds. The prior comptroller had managed this through clearing accounts and manual reclassifications. When he left, no one else knew how.
BST found more than 60 journal entries it had to develop itself, some involving multi-million dollar adjustments. A prior firm, ProNexus, had attempted to close the 2023 books before BST. The State found that work unreliable. The council had already appropriated ARPA funds for new accounting software. Those funds went unspent.
At the October 15 meeting, Carmella said the Administration was now moving forward on the upgrade. Implementation would take 12 to 18 months.
She called delivering the budget at all a “herculean effort.”
The Numbers
The 2025 proposed budget was approximately $5 million larger than 2024. Every dollar of the increase came from fixed mandated costs: pensions, health insurance, and debt service, which rose $1.1 million alone. The Administration held the tax rate increase to 1.89 percent and came in $89,415 under the tax cap.
The garbage fee increased from $162 to $252. Carmella called it necessary to compete with private haulers and acknowledged it was now a permanent fee. The budget also proposed a 10-cent-per-1,000-gallon water rate increase.
The assessments director flagged a structural problem the budget did not address: the city’s equalization rate had fallen to 65 percent. The last citywide property assessment was in 2011. A request for $10,000 to begin an assessment review was removed from the budget before submission.
The Delivery
The budget arrived electronically near midnight on October 15. The document was not searchable and had no index. A hard copy did not arrive until the afternoon of the October 15 meeting.
Steele: “I know for a fact that if you were sitting in this seat you would be just as frustrated as I am.”
Carmella defended the timeline, calling the circumstances extraordinary. Seven minutes was extraordinary. So was submitting a budget with errors.
Sources: Spectrum News, WAMC budget defense, WAMC Republican passage, Troy City Council Finance and Special Meeting, October 15, 2024 (transcript); Troy City Council Finance and Special Meeting, December 2, 2024 (clerk’s minutes)