Wauconda curbs spending

Wauconda is the latest suburb to take a hit from the drop in new home construction during a national housing market downturn.

Village officials are curbing spending because they anticipate receiving $500,000 less in sales tax and building permit revenues in 2008-09 compared to this year. They say that -- for now, at least -- the belt tightening will be internal and won't affect residents.

"Construction is very slow in Wauconda right now," Wauconda Mayor Salvatore Saccomanno said. "There are no new developers coming in. Even those that we have approved have yet to break ground. It's just a trickle down from where the economy is at right now."

Wauconda's operating fund balance has been steadily declining, a trend among local villages. The village had a fund balance of $16.6 million at the beginning of the 2007-08 fiscal year. It's expected to drop to roughly $8.5 million next year.

Neighboring Lake Zurich and Hawthorn Woods similarly blamed the housing market slump for deficits and budget cuts.

Saccomanno said cuts are being made in all departments and a hiring freeze is in place though there are no positions open at present in the village.

Officials are holding off on purchasing new public works vehicles and have cut the village staff's travel budget for conferences, seminars and classes for next year.

"We restricted that to whatever is local, anything else has been taken out," Saccomanno said. "It's just an overall tightening of the budget based on what we anticipate our 2008-2009 revenues to be."

Though the Wauconda village board recently discussed possibly cutting some services and programs, the board decided to defer any cuts that would directly impact residents, Saccomanno said.

"That's what we are trying to minimize," he said. "We need to maintain the services that we are already offering residents. We're first starting internally and trying to cut within."

The village may not be able to ward off program or service cuts for long, if the housing market doesn't pick up.

"Residents also need to know that with the economy being what it is we are going to be re-looking at this quite often throughout the next fiscal year," Saccomanno said.