Zanesville leaders are revising the city’s 2026 budget as higher fuel bills reach city hall at the same time as new grant money arrives, including a $566,672 federal grant for the fire department, the Zanesville Times Recorder reported.
“(Money is) coming in and going out,” budget and finance director Amanda Perkowski recently told members of city council, the Times Recorder reported. “We’re bringing on some money but also expending other money,” Perkowski told council, according to that reporting. NewsForce247 is attributing those remarks to the Times Recorder, which reported them from the council discussion.
The largest single cost adjustment the Times Recorder reported is fuel. The city’s gas, oil and diesel fuel fund, listed under vehicle and equipment maintenance, showed a $215,000 budget adjustment, rising from $700,000 to $915,000, according to the Times Recorder. A smaller example in the same revisions gave parks maintenance vehicles a $10,000 boost, raising that allocation from $19,000 to $29,000, the newspaper reported.
“No one planned around the Strait of Hormuz being closed,” Mayor Don Mason told the Times Recorder. Mason compared the city’s expenses to those of a typical household in that interview — when fuel and electricity go up, the city has to pay more and projects become more expensive too, the Times Recorder reported Mason as saying.
Insurance costs rose alongside fuel. An increase under miscellaneous contracts and services for self-insurance was listed at $111,665, going from about $1.205 million to approximately $1.317 million, according to the Times Recorder’s reporting on the budget revisions Perkowski presented to council.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on
What we know is the set of adjustments already presented to council and reported by the Times Recorder: the $215,000 fuel increase, the $111,665 self-insurance increase, the $10,000 parks vehicle boost, the fire department grant and its required match, and the $110,000 in added state money for Secrest Auditorium. What we are still waiting on is the council’s final action on the revised 2026 budget as a whole, and whether fuel and insurance costs force further revisions before the year ends — the very risk Mason described to the Times Recorder when he noted that higher operating costs also make city projects more expensive.
The fire department grant is the biggest single piece of new money in the revisions. Through FEMA’s Assistance to Firefighters grant program, the city received $566,672 to buy self-contained breathing apparatus for fire trucks, an exhaust removal system and specialized dryers to keep firefighting gear dry and sanitary, the Times Recorder reported. The city used a grant writer, Nationwide First Responders Grant LLC, to submit the application, according to that reporting.
The grant does not cover everything. It funded about 90 percent of the equipment, the Times Recorder reported, and the city had to match $51,516 and pay a successful award bonus of more than $36,061 to Nationwide. Those local costs are part of why Perkowski’s summary to council — money coming in and money going out at the same time — frames the whole revision, as reported by the Times Recorder.
A second windfall supports a project residents can already see under way. Zanesville received $110,000 from the Governor’s Office of Appalachia for the ongoing Secrest Auditorium expansion and renovation, the Times Recorder reported, after, in Mason’s telling to that newspaper, simply calling and asking for additional funding, with Mason noting that unused money at the end of a cycle can sometimes be redirected. The funding will support exterior construction and interior remodeling, including new seating and rewiring, according to that reporting.
For Zanesville households, the revisions are a window into the same pressure families describe at the pump and on utility bills, translated into a municipal ledger: a fuel fund that needed $215,000 more than planned, insurance lines rising six figures, and a fire department that could only equip itself by winning a competitive federal grant and finding more than $87,000 locally to match it and pay the grant writer’s bonus.
The next concrete step is council’s handling of the revised budget Perkowski presented, and the fire department’s purchases under the FEMA grant. Readers following Zanesville can also read our earlier coverage of the I-70 west closure in Zanesville on Monday morning and of Chillicothe Council’s first meeting in its new Yoctangee Park Armory home, another Appalachian Ohio city working through a major public project this fall.
NewsForce247 will follow the budget revisions as council acts on them, and will report the fire department equipment purchases when the city confirms them.
Photo: Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0