All of us are focused on improving education, expanding affordable housing opportunities, enhancing public safety, combatting climate change, and committed to equity. This proposed and preliminarily approved FY23 budget will also grow our reserves, helps preserve our AAA bond rating, and provides improved compensation for our employees. This budget makes historic investments while not raising taxes on our residents during these volatile economic times.
After two years of operating in crisis mode in response to the pandemic, nearly 15 years since the beginning of the Great Recession, and, for the first time since I have been a County official, our revenues have returned stronger than even predicted. We finally have the revenue we needed to make key investments as well as right sizing many priorities after years of cuts and similar budgets. This is a long way from just three years ago when we inherited a $90 million dollar deficit in our first budget, a same service budget in our second year at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a budget last year that was supplemented by federal funds that allowed us to have another same services budget that limited our ability to address increasing needs.
