LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – The city of Lansing’s General Fund revenues increased by about $37.5 million in 2024 compared to the pre-pandemic 2019, about 4% above the rate of inflation.
The General Fund’s $166.8 million in 2024 allowed Lansing to have a $11.2 million cushion in terms of revenues over expenditures.
And that city’s biggest source of revenue in 2024 was property taxes and special assessments, which increased from $40.6 million to $56.9 million over that five-year span.
Lansing is not an outlier. Municipalities across the state of Michigan are reporting record levels of revenues for 2024.
Part of that is to due to the injection of federal pandemic relief money. The American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, gave Michigan municipalities $6.5 billion in 2021 in what was called “flexible state fiscal recovery funds” to respond to the pandemic. That pumped a lot of money into government budgets.
But property taxes have also provided a big boost, according to the financial documents that municipalities have been submitting to the state of Michigan over the past few months.
The city of Grand Rapids collected a record $55.4 million in property taxes in 2024, about $13.8 million more than it extracted in 2019. That’s one reason why Grand Rapids total revenues increased to a record $358.7 million in 2024, almost $48 million higher than the previous year.