Allentown City Council on Wednesday evening rejected a 4% property tax increase proposed by Mayor Matt Tuerk, and voted to instead take an additional $1.5 million from the city’s cash reserves to balance the 2026 budget.
The vote was 5-2, with Council members Cynthia Mota, Daryl Hendricks, Natalie Santos, Ce-Ce Gerlach and Ed Zucal voting to strike the tax increase in a budget amendment. Candida Affa and Santo Napoli voted against doing so. A final vote on the budget is scheduled Dec. 10.
In an interview following the vote, Tuerk criticized council and said he may veto the budget if it passes in a final vote with no tax increase.
“I am embarrassed to be in a room for this long, and to watch City Council make asinine decisions,” Tuerk said.
Mota, who sponsored the amendment to strike the tax increase, said that she thought the city should not impose both a tax increase and a trash fee hike in the same year.
The city’s proposed 2026 budget includes a $140 increase to trash fees, which is necessary to cover the increasing cost of its contract with trash collector J.P. Mascaro, Tuerk has said.
The five-year trash contract, which began last year, calls for a 5% increase each year of the contract.
“I am mostly in agreement that in order for a city to thrive, we need to raise taxes gradually. I do understand that, but we also have to know when,” Mota said. “In my humble opinion, I don’t think this is the time.”
The $246 million 2026 budget adds no positions or major expenditures next year, but continues to fund jobs and projects, including plans for a multimillion dollar police headquarters renovation, improvements to the Martin Luther King Jr. Trail and traffic safety upgrades.
At the same time, the city is facing financial challenges including increasing pension obligations, revoked federal funding and growing employee health care insurance costs, which is why the tax increase is necessary, Tuerk said Thursday. His budget proposal already included using $2.6 million of the city’s general fund reserves to balance the budget.
Financial projections show the city expects to end 2026 with around $42 million in reserves.
Tuerk said neglecting to raise taxes and instead taking more money from the city’s reserves would likely hurt Allentown’s credit rating, which would make it more difficult to borrow money. The city this year approved $134 million in borrowing to finance capital projects including a new police building and fire and emergency medical services building.
Allentown’s tax millage rate is 23.53 mills, and the new rate under Tuerk’s proposal would be 24.46. Property tax is calculated via the millage rate: annual taxes are the assessed value of a property times the millage rate divided by 1,000. According to Tuerk, around half of the city’s residents would see an increase of $26 or less annually under the proposed new millage rate.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Tuerk proposed a compromise to City Council, which members rejected. His compromise would have kept the 4% tax increase but reduced the trash fee increase to $115, and pulled around $800,000 from the city’s reserves to make up the difference.
In an interview following the meeting, Mota said she would stick to her vote and would not consider Tuerk’s compromise proposal.
“It is too much,” Mota said. “The citizens of Allentown live paycheck to paycheck, and any penny counts, and that is the reality.”
Hendricks, who also voted to strip away the tax increase, said Tuerk did not give City Council enough time to consider his compromise; council members learned about it last night just before their vote.
“Give us a little time to digest these things,” Hendricks said. “We are at a meeting, the meeting starts and we find he’s proposing this, and it just doesn’t work.”
The city’s last property tax increase was in 2019, when former Mayor Ray O’Connell vetoed City Council’s proposed budget, which did not include a tax hike, and instead enacted a 27% increase. Before that, the city had not seen a tax increase since 2005.
In 2023, City Council rejected a proposal from Tuerk to raise property taxes by 2%. Tuerk vetoed council’s budget, but council members overrode his veto, keeping taxes level in 2024.
City Council also approved other amendments to the budget, including allocating $100,000 to homeless initiatives, which would go toward funding homeless people’s hotel stays, laundry and other services. The city also approved the addition of a deputy director of human resources and several reclassifications of jobs in the Community and Economic Development Department.
Council rejected proposals from Tuerk that would have upgraded two positions in the mayor’s office, funded with an additional $15,000 in salary across the two jobs.
Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.com.
