The city of Sammamish continues to boast a “sustainable” budget, City Manager Lyman Howard told the council last week.

“Basically, we’ve lived within our means,” he said during a financial overview at the Feb. 16 meeting. “The operating budget remains in strong financial shape.”

This year’s operating budget of $43.5 million includes a $31.9 million general fund, a $6.9 million street fund, a $3.1 million surface water management fund and several smaller line items that cover the city’s internal operations, such as the $1 million technology replacement fund.

In 2016, the city budgets a total of $69.1 million in expenditures, of which the general fund makes up nearly half.

As it relates to all Washington cities, Sammamish does prioritize money a little differently.

“For example, most cities will spend more money on law and justice, which are police services and court services,” Howard said.

Reversely, Sammamish tends to spend more money on transportation than other Washington cities, according to the state auditor’s data in 2014, the most recent available.

“We’re put together differently than other cities,” Howard said. “We’ve spent our money … to focus and prioritize for the things that have been important to the council and our taxpayers.”

The city’s core operating principals, which guide budget prioritization, include approaching the budget with a conservative mind, imploring a “development-pays-for-development” philosophy and treating operating surplus as “one-time money,” Howard said.

The overview, including long-range projections, will aid the council in conversations later in the year related to the city’s financial planning. The city anticipates, at its current pace, revenues will not exceed expenditures shortly after 2020, Howard said.

The council has several “tools” it could implement to avoid that crossover point, Howard said.

For example, the city has banked the last several years worth of property tax increases — a one-time pay out of $1.5 million, as of the end of 2015. (The City Council voted at the end of last year not to increase the property tax by 1 percent, allowed by state law, for the seventh consecutive year.)

In 2014, the property, sales, utility and business taxes generated 75 percent of other Washington cities’ revenues, according to the state auditor.

“Sammamish, on the other hand, is quite in contrast. Property tax makes up about 64 percent of our general fund revenues,” Howard said. “That is good and bad, in that property tax is a very stable source of revenue but without new construction it does not grow very fast.”

In 2009, the city projected that crossover date to be in 2013; however, the recession brought the cost of expenditures down. That, coupled with the city’s prudent planning, helped push that date out without implementing a utility tax or business tax, both of which the city does not have currently.

With the surplus of $7.96 million carried over from 2015, the 2016 surplus is expected to be just shy of $40 million.