MARSHALL — The city of Marshall will be moving forward with a 9.9% levy increase next year. On Tuesday, city council members voted to approve both a 2024 budget, and a property tax levy of about $8.98 million.

“This does remain at the 9.9% levy increase from 2023,” said E.J. Moberg, director of administrative services for the city.

Council member Steven Meister said the 2024 budget process had been a challenging one.

“We have worked this and worked it and worked it, and costs are going up everywhere. And I don’t think there’s one council member up here who’s happy with where we are,” Meister said. However, he said city staff and council members had worked to keep budget and levy costs down as best they could. “We’re doing a lot better than a lot of our comparable cities.”

Moberg said there were a few main reasons impacting the proposed levy increase. They included bonding that the city did in 2023, which Moberg said impacted the levy by 4.1%. Other impacts on the levy increase included capital equipment costs and increasing payroll costs.

Moberg said there were also some unexpected cost increases that the city was facing, like the cost of its workers compensation insurance premium.

“As recently as a few weeks ago, we thought we were at about $274,000 for our worker’s compensation policy, which would have been a 19.1% increase. We got the actual number for that after the fact, and it’s actually $313,000-plus for one year, so it’s actually a 36.1% increase,” Moberg said. The budget being presented to the council on Tuesday didn’t reflect the increased costs of the workers compensation policy, he said.

There wasn’t much discussion of the levy and budget proposals from council members. In separate motions, they voted to approve the 2024 budget, and the 9.9% levy increase.