Chillicothe’s 2027 budget requests are running $1.2 million ahead of projected revenue, Mayor Luke Feeney told City Council on Monday, Nov. 9, in the first budget cycle to feel the full weight of last year’s paper mill closing, the Scioto Post reported. Feeney delivered the briefing as council met in its new home, the renovated Memorial Armory in Yoctangee Park, the Scioto Post reported.
Every city department has presented its budget and funding requests for 2027, and the mayor and the city auditor are working through the annual year-end process almost daily, Feeney said, according to the Scioto Post. Feeney said the city would try to update its revenue projections as late as possible in the process, so the final numbers rest on the most current data available.
The size of the gap is best understood the way Feeney framed it for council: $1.2 million is roughly the cost of 12 city employees, the Scioto Post reported. Feeney said he is not looking at personnel cuts, but he did eliminate departments’ additional staffing requests — and department requests were already thin on capital spending, which makes reducing the gap more challenging, the Scioto Post reported.
"We’ve got a lot of work to do to get that number down, to balance the budget this year," Feeney said, according to the Scioto Post’s coverage of the briefing.
The cause, Feeney told council, is the paper mill. This is the first budget cycle to feel the full pain of the mill closing, which cost about 830 employees who paid city income tax, along with income the city received through its utilities, culminating in August 2025, the Scioto Post reported. A city of Chillicothe’s size does not replace an employer of that scale in a single budget year: the lost wages show up as lost income-tax receipts on every paycheck that no longer exists.
The mill’s closure was announced on April 15, 2025, by Pixelle Specialty Solutions, and the Chillicothe Gazette reported at the time that the closure would end a paper-making operation in the city after 215 years and affect about 800 workers. The mayor said then that his heart went out to those affected, the Gazette reported, and state and local officials spent the following months working on the site’s future.
That future has itself become a political fight. In a letter dated Oct. 31, 2026, U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno wrote to Feeney that he and U.S. Sen. Jon Husted had made the mill workers’ future a top priority, that they secured an additional 60 days of full wages and benefits for every mill employee, and that a buyer they recruited has already restored 210 jobs in less than 12 months, according to the letter, which Moreno’s office published. Moreno also wrote that $5.5 million was committed by the prior owner for former employees, with $1 million already distributed, and that paper production is set to resume by the end of the year. Those figures are Moreno’s claims in his letter; Feeney has disputed remarks attributed to him in the exchange, J News Network reported. Whichever account prevails, Feeney’s Nov. 9 briefing is the on-the-ground ledger: the city’s general fund is $1.2 million short.
Council’s own agenda the same night added a second revenue decision. Feeney pointed out, without acrimony, that the council agenda’s Item 3 would also reduce city revenue — a 12% reduction in city property taxes meant to balance out an increase in state property taxes — and council passed that ordinance unanimously on first reading in the same session, the Scioto Post reported.
The setting underlined how much is in motion at City Hall at once. Council met in the Armory’s ballroom — the renovated former gymnasium in Yoctangee Park — its new long-term temporary home after ribbon cuttings over the weekend, with about 30 people in a room rated for 227, and audio bugs still being worked out, the Scioto Post reported.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on: the confirmed facts are the mayor’s own figures from Nov. 9 — requests $1.2 million over projected revenue, no personnel cuts planned, new staffing requests eliminated, and revenue projections to be refreshed late in the process, all as the Scioto Post reported. What is not yet known is where the remaining cuts or adjustments will fall, or the final shape of the budget council will be asked to adopt; neither the briefing nor the Scioto Post’s report gave a date for that vote, so none is reported here.
The budget crunch has not frozen the rest of the city’s work. Chillicothe is finishing a long-running street project, as NewsForce247 reported in our coverage of Bridge Street reopening fully by Nov. 20, and its downtown efforts are still drawing investment, as NewsForce247 reported when the downtown incubator received a $32,000 boost toward 10 new jobs.
What happens next: the mayor and auditor continue the near-daily budget work Feeney described, and council’s next public discussion of a growth question comes quickly — the city holds a public open house on proposed data center land-use standards on Monday, Nov. 16, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Armory, the Chillicothe Gazette reported. The budget itself must be balanced before adoption; how Chillicothe gets from $1.2 million over to balanced will be the city’s defining decision of the winter.