LOS LUNAS—The village of Los Lunas is using every resource available to get reimbursements and grant funding wherever it can.
Los Lunas Administrator Greg Martin said the village hasn’t seen a drastic change in revenue, but is still planning for the worst.
“If you look at the numbers, we haven’t necessarily seen a GRT hit yet,” Martin said. “The last three and four months haven’t necessarily materialized in the decrease of GRT, which I think is consistent with a lot of places throughout the state, which has been welcome but hasn’t been necessarily what we expect to stay at.”
Martin said this year’s fiscal year budget was reduced quite a bit in GRT revenue to account for the possible loss of revenue.
“Our first strategy was to budget conservatively and to account for a possible decrease in GRT revenue in the new fiscal year. I think that was the very responsible way to look at the future just in case,” Martin said.
“We are obviously tracking our expenditures that are related to COVID-19, direct expenditures that we have the opportunity to get reimbursement from FEMA funds and work at keeping track of that.”
Martin also said they are taking advantage of funding from the CARES Act, which allows towns to seek reimbursement for COVID-related expenses.
Martin said they will have to wait and see how the revenue comes in and make sure whenever they have expenses that are over what are expected due to the pandemic, that they will seek reimbursement wherever it is available.
“Unfortunately, there’s no playbook for this sort of thing,” Martin said. “We, along with everyone else, are operating the best that we can in an environment of not really knowing what the future holds, but we feel pretty good about our efforts to plan for this fiscal year.”
Martin said they budgeted a total of $16,515,152 in gross receipts tax revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021. The village’s budgeted revenues are projected to be $57,441,425 and the expenditures are $69,140,812.
On the list of capital outlay projects is the water and sewage fund at $8,170,309, the I-25 Interchange project at $7,507,182, the state LEDA Facebook project at $6,567,000, the Local LEDA GRT Fund capital outlay at $5,850,335 and the Infrastructure Fund at $5,793,573.
