Vicksburg officials will present a $28.6 million budget next week that keeps overall spending stable, retains all personnel and does not raise tax rates.

The plan will be presented to the public for questions and comments at a hearing a week from today at City Hall. It must be approved by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen before the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1.

The Warren County Board of Supervisors set Sept. 5 to unveil its spending plan. The county’s plan, though not yet available to the public, also does not include any tax rate increases, County Administrator John Smith has said.

Both budgets expect additional revenue in the year to come.

For this year, the city has also seen more income, largely due to increasing utility rates and decreasing the subsidy for bills from the general fund, as well as higher valuations on property, increased casino revenue and higher state sales tax rebates. Those amounts covered next year’s $27.9 million spending plan and made the planning process for the coming year &#8220by far the easiest” in the administration of Mayor Laurence Leyens, entering the second year of his second four-year term.

Sales tax revenue remained well ahead of schedule in July, according to numbers submitted Wednesday by the state to the city’s strategic planner, Paul Rogers. The city’s cut of the 7 percent general sales tax was $643,774, putting the year-to-date total a little less than $300,000 short of the overall $6.6 million expected for the year.

Monthly totals have topped 2005 levels every month this fiscal year.

Much of that windfall, however, was reaped from Hurricane Katrina’s destruction to the south, and Rogers pared the expected $7.37 million total through October down to $7.28 million for the upcoming year.

&#8220Those numbers were high. I don’t expect it to do the same thing again,” Rogers said.

The &#8220overage” on funding requests from department heads for the upcoming year was about $3 million, one of the lowest amounts in years. Among big-ticket items left out were a $1.6 million generator for the Water Treatment Plant and $100,000 for parade barriers for police use.

Despite the financial health, Leyens has said he was interested in cutting personnel to reduce the burden of a payroll that currently takes up abut 70 percent of total spending. For this year, Leyens led a push to cut the Department of Human Services’ $530,000 budget from the overall spending plan.

&#8220We cut that money from the budget and we didn’t lose a single service,” he said Tuesday while speaking at the weekly meeting of the Vicksburg Kiwanis Club.

Also not in the spending plan is the $10 million to $12 million expected to be raised in a fall bond issue. So far, ideas are to fund an urban renewal of historic riverfront properties from Washington Street west to the Mississippi River and Yazoo Diversion Canal in the Oak Street Corridor with some of that money. Portions will also go to a replacement for the Washington Street bridge near Clark Street, the first phase of a $20 million recreational complex on Fisher Ferry Road and $7 million in citywide paving projects. Specific locations of the planned paving have not been determined, said Public Works Director James &#8220Bubba” Rainer.

The city still has roughly $12 million to pay on its last bond issue, $18 million borrowed six years ago, much of which was spent on downtown business renewal. Rogers has said the city will pay $2 million a year through 2011 on that debt.