Cuts being made at the federal level due to mandates handed to the Department of Government Efficiency should not impact the city’s budget planning process for the upcoming fiscal year, Roanoke Rapids City Council learned Tuesday.

“Today the city administration has not been notified of any interruptions or delays in federal funding sources that the city receives as a unit of local government,” City Manager Kelly Traynham said during her report.

Traynham said it’s important to note that the city actively engages in various funding and grant contract work from state and federal agencies, philanthropic organizations and other donors. “These revenues help to diversify our spending and revenue streams to create additional programming and services that help us to deliver and address emerging challenges.”

The city is “diligently complying” with those federal, state and local grants criteria. “In many grants there’s a lot of what we call red tape and a lot of due diligence involved, but we do comply with those and we try to identify challenges and opportunities that may present themselves along the way.”

Said Traynham: “I do want to emphasize that we do not anticipate any significant or negative impacts on our services as the result of the current federal administration — the cuts in spending that are occurring. We will remain transparent in this and continue to notify you as well as our staff and citizens should that change. But at this point we don’t anticipate any impacts in our upcoming budget preparation.”

Should there be any changes, she said, “I have full faith and confidence in our city council and our administration to be able to adjust to any changes that come our way. We’re accustomed to changes in the needs that we have and I hope that eases any concerns.”

Starting today and through Monday Traynham and Finance Director Carmen Johnson will be meeting with department heads about their upcoming fiscal year budget requests. “We anticipate and always expect them to far exceed our available balance, but we’ll summarize those findings and present those to the city council in April.”

The city has not received its projected revenues from the state as of this report.