Ephraim 2027 budget down $5.5 million from FY2026

EPHRAIM—The Ephraim City budget for 2026-27 budget (July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027) is $19.8 million, down $5.5 million, or more than 28 % from 2025-26, the year just completed.

That’s for the budget that covers everything—from general government to the city’s electric utility.

“Most areas are pretty similar to in the past,” Jon Knudsen, city finance director, said. “The big fluctuations were capital projects, including large water lines, the electric plant and the public works facility.” (The new public works campus is the site on the west side of Ephraim where a 17,000-square-foot for the Public Works Department and where another building for the Electrical Department is planned.)

The general fund, the part of the budget most people associate with city government covering items such as administration, finance, police, fire, recreation and the library, also went down slightly. Last year, the general fund budget was $6.21 million. This year, it’s $6.18 million, down about by a half a percent.”

The biggest piece of overall budget pie is more than a dozen “restricted” or “enterprise funds.”

“Restricted funds” contain money that can be spent only for a designated purpose. For example, the city has a “Class C Roads and Mass Transit Fund.” That fund contains a mix of state and federal funds for road maintenance, and a local-option sales tax for highways that Sanpete County voters approved several years ago.

Those funds can only be used for streets and roads. In fact, the Ephraim general fund budget for next year contains all zeros under the “Streets” category because virtually all street maintenance will be funded from the federal/state assistance, the highway sales tax and a few other grants.        

Enterprise Funds get their revenue primarily from user fees, although those operations can also get grants and loans for major projects. The main enterprise funds in Ephraim are water, sewer, power and garbage.

The 2026-27 budgets for water, sewer and power alone come to nearly $11 million. And the total of those three items is down about $5.5 million compared to 2025-26.

Last year, the cumulative total of restricted and enterprise funds was $19 million. The same figure for the upcoming year is $13.6 million.

That’s a reduction of $5.4 million or 28%. In fact, the reduction in restricted and enterprise funding accounts for all but a sliver of the drop in total city expenditures from last year to this year.

A few examples of capital projects that inflated last year’s numbers, which dropped as the project were completed:

            • Last year, the city cut funding to what had been the Granary Arts Center and reallocated it to $150,000 for replacement of the heating and air conditioning system and other upgrades to city hall. That work got completed, contributing to a $138,0300 drop in a general fund budget line for “government buildings.”

            • Last year, the city budgeted about $3.7 million to rebuild 1.7 miles of its “lower penstock line,” a big pipeline that brings water from city springs into one of its hydroelectric plants. A federal grant, state grant and state loan covered most of the costs. But both the grant and city fund were included in the budget for the water enterprise fund.

            • And last year, the city remodeled the so-called “power house,” repurposing it as a natural-gas fired electricity generating plant. It also bonded for some of the plant costs. That contributed to a $700,000 drop in the electric fund budget for this year.

There were also some examples of economizing. The cost of the city justice court dropped by $60,000. Knudsen said that’s because a long-time employee of the court retired and the city decided not to replace the position.

Meanwhile, Knudsen said, salary and wages in the recreation department dropped from $124,172 to $79,600 because a full-time staff person left, and the city decided to replace the position with two part-time employees who don’t receive benefits.