ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Allentown’s budget woes continue.<\/p>\n
During a special meeting Tuesday night, Allentown City Council was one vote short of overriding the mayor’s veto of the 2026 budget, now leaving the city without a spending plan.<\/p>\n
Four council members — Cynthia Mota, CeCe Gerlach, Ed Zucal and Natalie Santos — voted for overriding, while the other three members — Daryl Hendricks, Santo Napoli and Candida Affa — voted against it.<\/p>\n
Five out of seven council members would need to vote to override.<\/p>\n
There is no default budget in the current charter, officials say, so since the override failed, the mayor’s initial budget will not go into effect, as city officials previously indicated.<\/p>\n
Allentown now does not have an adopted 2026 budget.<\/p>\n
The spending plan voted on by council earlier this month was\u00a0vetoed by Mayor Matt Tuerk because it did not include his administration’s 3.96% property tax increase.<\/p>\n
“I vetoed it because I don’t believe in unbalanced budgets. I don’t think we should be dipping into reserves to pay for essential expenses and services,” Tuerk previously told 69 News.<\/p>\n
Tuerk says his administration’s proposed 3.96% increase would cost residents just over $2 more a month, and is necessary to keep the city fiscally sound.<\/p>\n
City council members who oppose the property tax increase disagree with Tuerk’s decision.<\/p>\n
69 News is working to learn more on what this means for the city going forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Allentown’s budget woes continue. During a special meeting Tuesday night, Allentown City Council was one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,232,153,155,154,4958],"class_list":{"0":"post-74289","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bethlehem","8":"tag-_homepage_top_stories","9":"tag-allentown-area","10":"tag-bethlehem","11":"tag-bethlehem-headlines","12":"tag-bethlehem-news","13":"tag-city_township_county_councils"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}