A nice change may come for residents of the City of Butler in 2026 in the form of tax cuts.

At a preliminary budget discussion meeting held Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Bob Dandoy and Butler City Council stated the proceeds from the sale of the Butler Area Sewer System last October will give the city leeway to “pare down” its debt service. This would allow the city to potentially lower its municipal tax rate from 44 mills to 33 — a 25% reduction.

“The thing I like about the tax reduction ... is that it applies to every property owner that’s paying that money,” Dandoy said. “That’s businesses, residents, everybody.”

Dandoy said the city will be able to implement tax cuts as soon as 2026 by chipping away at the debt service using the city’s Legacy Fund. The fund, established in March, is made up of $50 million the city received from the BASA sale.

Although no vote was taken on any tax reduction for 2026, Dandoy was confident that such a vote would happen in the near future.

“We haven’t voted on it yet, but we are moving forward with it,” Dandoy said. “Eleven mills are going off the board. They are not going to be paying that. I think we’re all pretty much committed to that. It’s ridiculous to get this much money in and not have that benefit.”

What is uncertain, however, is just how the city plans to use the BASA money to reduce its debt service. Dandoy said there are two ways the city could go about doing so: paying it off in one lump sum or starting a separate fund and using the interest from it to pay off the debt slowly.

“For easy bookkeeping, we can take a bunch of money, we set it up and we say, ‘Here is this amount of money sitting in an account. The only thing that can be touched for is for paying the debt service.’ So the interest of that is paid and that relieves the burden on the taxpayer,” Dandoy said. “Or we can eliminate it and we’ll pay it off now.”

However, Dandoy noted, for the city’s taxpayers, the end result will be identical regardless of what council chooses to do.

The current 44-mill municipal tax rate for Butler does not include the county tax rate of 27.626 mills or Butler Area School District’s tax rate of 109.64 mills.