Part 1 | The Budget Breakdown: This is a 3-part story scheduled to publish for three consecutive days. This story looks into the proposed 2025 budget for the City of Toledo.
TOLEDO – Vision casting for the new year is not lost on local governments, as plans and funding need to be approved in their yearly budgets.
In November, Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz presented his 2025 budget to Toledo City Council, who has until the end of March to make changes and approve the 212-page document.
The 2025 proposed city budget completes the transition off of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, while maintaining current operations, eliminates 55 Full Time Employee (FTE) positions in the budget, and allowed for saving $60 million by the end of 2025, leading to an increased bond rating for the City of Toledo.
Economic development plans in the budget focus on a new Glass Center of Excellence, based in Perrysburg that will bring in more jobs, and renovating east Toledo streets surrounding the Glass City Riverwalk. Toledo’s main challenges remain finding enough money to invest in remediating blight or poorly maintained areas, lowering crime rates, attracting future investments within the city and reversing Toledo’s chronic population decline.
According to Kapszukiewicz, this new budget invests further in public safety, including a 4 percent raise for government employees, roads, community initiatives and a sizable “rainy-day” fund.
Breaking down the total budget
About $1 billion was proposed for the entire city budget, which is down by about half a billion dollars from last year. The main cuts to the overall budget were made in the following sections:
- Enterprise ($526M to $317M)
- Special Revenue ($294M to $94M)
- Capital Projects ($276M to $111M)
The Toledo Free Press will be diving into these numbers in the future, but part of the reason for this drop-off is supplemental grant funding.
Melanie Campbell, the interim finance director, clarified that the 2024 budget included grants and capital projects that are in process, which can span multiple years.
One such grant are the funds associated with the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
“In 2020 and 2021, the federal government made a historic level of investment in local governments and local communities, a level we haven’t seen since the Great Depression,” said Simon Nyi, the grants commissioner for the City of Toledo. “And Toledo has done a good job of getting our fair share of that money.”
In total, Toledo received $180.9 million in ARPA funds in 2021, on par with much larger cities, like Columbus, Ohio, which received $187 million in ARPA funds.
“The numbers make it clear that on a per-capita basis, we have been among the most successful cities in Ohio at securing these grant dollars, and we’ve been succeeding at a level comparable to much larger cities nationwide; there is no question that we’re ‘punching above our weight,’” Nyi said when referring to the total amount of grants Toledo received (not just ARPA).
Projects funded with ARPA include afterschool programs, parks projects and — most prominently — $19 million of the $28.7 million for the up-and-coming Wayman D. Palmer YMCA in the Warren-Sherman neighborhood, a neighborhood Kapszukiewicz said has been overlooked for years.
ARPA funds will be spent into 2026, but had to be obligated, not just budgeted, before the end of 2024. All ARPA funds must be spent by the end of 2026.
Changes in the General Fund
The total proposed expenditures for the General Fund — the part of the budget that deals with most community-based services in Toledo — is $365,231,389.
This figure is up about $30 million, 9 percent from last year’s budget, and last year’s budget was up 8 percent from the previous year’s budget in 2023.
City financial planners estimate an increase in the budget to $375 million in 2026, and further stabilization of spending afterwards.
Summarizing the spending in the General Fund was councilman George Sarantou. He said that “police, fire and the courts are priority in this budget, as they always have been.”
A majority of the General Fund is allocated to the fire and police departments, who alone make up $200,903,482 – or 55 percent – of the total General Fund, up from 51 percent last year.
Proudly, Kapszukiewicz declared that he has “grown the size of the police force,” during his tenure as mayor.
“Actually, the previous administrations had sort of used it [the police force], as a budget-saving mechanism. And so by the time I became mayor, the size of the police force was down to about 585,” he added.
The personnel department within the Toledo Police Department (TPD), which handles matters related to employee recruitment, told the Free Press in early January that they had 584 sworn officers (not civilians) on hand, but are expecting 28 new police officers from a class that graduated on Jan. 17. By the end of January Toledo should have 612 police officers.
2023’s annual police report summary documented 628 total police officers with 492 patrolmen.
The increased Public Safety Department budget, which contains the Police and Fire & Rescue departments, can almost solely account for the increase in spending in the new budget.
In 2024, the Public Safety budget was $205 million, and the newly proposed one is $236 million.
Kapszukiewicz is hoping to add a police class of 30 and a class of 20 firefighters, but it’s unclear if this is maintaining or growing the departments.
The budget details the new police class of 30 should be ready to start by the end of March, and reads, “The Toledo Police Department does not currently have any new positions in the 2025 budget.”
In fact, the budget details a net -18.8 full-time employee (FTE) positions, and explains the added $8.95 million to their budget is to keep pace with previous year’s allocations subsidized by ARPA funding, as well as the 4 percent raise to all city employees.
“There’s a lot of reasons our crime has gone down,” Kapszukiewicz noted. “One of them [the reasons] is that we’ve grown the size of the police force so that there are more officers able to do the community policing and foot patrols that we think work.”
High crime? Low crime?
Crime has dropped dramatically since 2021, a record year for violent crime across many communities, including Toledo. TPD reported 68 homicides that year, and last year TPD reported 37 homicides, roughly on par with pre-pandemic rates of homicide in the city.
“What we’ve seen in Toledo, our results are better than the average city. So, for instance, from 2022 to 2023…you’re right, homicides went down by 10 percent in American cities, but in Toledo, they went down by 30 percent,” Kapszukiewicz said.
According to the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), who gets their data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), “The number of homicides in the 29 cities providing data for that crime [homicide] was 13 percent lower,” from 2023 to 2024, noting a national downward trend in crime.
Data based on the first six months of 2024 – per a report from the CCJ (see Link 1) – appears to roughly put the average rate of homicide for these 29 cities – which include Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, Syracuse and more – roughly at 17 homicides per 100,000 people a year.
The average rate of homicide for a city the size of Toledo can roughly be calculated to about 45 homicides a year across the country, roughly 17.77 percent less than the average of the cities.
Unfortunately, when looking at the broader data for non-lethal crime, aggravated assault statistics in particular, a figure that was missing from Kapszukiewicz and Police Chief Michael Troendle’s press event on Jan. 15, have consistently been far above the average nationally.
Data provided by TPD in 2023 showed a total of 2,426 aggravated assaults in Toledo, and the estimated average rate for 2023 across the 29 cities presented by the CCJ was 557.8 assaults per 100,000 people. Adjusted for Toledo’s population of 265,000 people, the city would be on par if it was at 1,478 aggravated assaults.
However, the rate of aggravated assault is 64 percent higher than the average across the cities culled, and the rate of violent crime in Toledo when compared to non-cities is more than double.
Regardless, compared to its pandemic highs, Toledo is improving its crime statistics and getting back to pre-pandemic numbers.
Further investments in the police include $2.75 million from the Capital Improvement Fund for procuring equipment for police, and $850,000 is allocated towards the Fire & Rescue Department.
The class of 20 firefighters is slated to start their academy training in August, and the Fire & Rescue Department contains 602.15 FTEs in the budget spreadsheet. This represents -19.75 FTEs from 2024.
The largest expense for both police and fire departments is labor (See Figure 3).
