The adopted FY2026 budget and audited FY2025 financial results for Monroe — county seat of
Walton County — drawn entirely from the city's own published budget book and Annual Comprehensive
Financial Report. Every breakdown below sums exactly to its stated total.
Population 16,270 (2025 est.)
Incorporated 1821
County seat of Walton County
Fiscal year Jan 1 – Dec 31
City Hall 215 N Broad Street, Monroe, GA 30655
GFOA Triple Crown award winner
FY2026 · Adopted
$86,145,012
Total budget, all funds
Budget book transmittal letter and City-Wide Budget Overview.
FY2026 · Adopted
$19,837,329
General Fund budget
The city's main operating fund for general government services.
FY2025 · Audited
$8,627,476
General Fund fund balance
Unassigned balance of $8,434,845 — 39.8% of FY2025 General Fund expenditures.
FY2025 · Audited
$15,097,569
Total governmental fund balances
General Fund, SPLOST funds, and all other governmental funds combined.
FY2025 · Audited
$58,306,814
Total long-term debt outstanding
General Obligation debt: $0. Most of the total sits in the utilities system.
FY2025 · Audited
$176,728,525
Total net position
Government-wide net position at December 31, 2025.
2025
6.934 mills
Millage rate
City property tax rate for 2025.
Why the utility fund dwarfs the General Fund: Monroe runs its own combined
utilities system — electric, water, sewer, natural gas, telecom/fiber, and solid waste — so the
$52.0M Combined Utilities Fund is a business-type operation paid for by ratepayers, not general
government spending.
FY2026 Adopted Budget by Fund
Every fund in the city's FY2026 adopted budget. The fourteen rows sum exactly to the $86,145,012 all-funds total.
Where the $19,837,329 General Fund budget goes. Public safety — police and fire — takes just over three-fifths of the fund. Percentages are the budget book's table values.
What the city's governmental funds held at December 31, 2025, per the audited financial statements. The General Fund balance is $8,627,476 — $192,631 nonspendable plus $8,434,845 unassigned. Audited FY2025 General Fund expenditures were $21,186,885.
Long-term debt at December 31, 2025. Over 91% of it belongs to the business-type utilities system, not general government — and the city carries no General Obligation debt at all.
Business-type activities (utilities)$53,372,280
Governmental activities$4,934,534
Total long-term debt outstanding$58,306,814
General Obligation debt
$0 — last GO bond paid off in 2019
Legal debt margin
$89.6M per the ACFR
Bond ratings
GO A+ (S&P) · Utility revenue A2 (Moody's), A− (S&P)
Capital spending in the FY2026 adopted budget totals $13,889,936 — overwhelmingly utility-system investment, with SPLOST 2025 sales-tax funds covering most of the rest.
Where the city's own documents disagree with themselves, this page says so rather than smoothing it over.
"Adopted" vs. "Proposed." The budget book's cover and the city's Finance page title this document the "Adopted FY2026 Budget," and the FY2026 figures here are labeled Adopted accordingly. However, many interior pages and tables of the ClearGov-generated book retain the header "Proposed FY2026 Budget." A separate ClearGov "City Budget Book FY2026" version also circulates — the figures on this page are from the city's adopted detail version.
Percentages were recomputed. The budget book's auto-generated narrative paragraphs misstate several shares — Public Safety as "59%" against the table's 61.19%, General Government as "15.3%" against 12.51%, Police as "45.2% of General Fund expenditures" against 43.26% — and it prints total Interfund Transfers as "1.24% of total budget revenues," off by roughly 100×. Every percentage on this page was recomputed from the book's own tables, which sum exactly.
Two tables are off by $1. Two FY2026 General Fund tables in the budget book (revenues by department and the five-year trend table) each differ by $1 from the stated total. The function and category tables used on this page sum exactly.
A $5,000 disagreement between documents. The FY2025 General Fund original budget is stated as $19,319,606 in the ACFR and $19,314,606 in the FY2026 budget book — a $5,000 difference between the city's two documents.
Debt figures are not blended. The ACFR's $58,306,814 total long-term debt — which includes leases and financed purchases and is net of premiums — is broader than the budget book's $55,444,183 schedule of bonds and notes payable at January 1, 2026. The two are not combined on this page; the audited ACFR figure is the headline.
Three population figures circulate. Population is shown as 16,270 (2025 Census Bureau estimates, per the ACFR). The budget book also prints 15,036 (from an ACS-based chart) and 14,675 (the 2020 Census count).
Minor items. A $122 difference appears between two beginning-balance figures inside the budget book's General Fund summary, and a transmittal-letter reference to "$8.8 million remaining" from the 2005 SPLOST does not reconcile with the SPLOST fund tables (about $5.8M) in the same book.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from one of these two City of Monroe documents.
Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for the Year Ended December 31, 2025 City of Monroe, Georgia — FY2025, Audited. Mauldin & Jenkins, LLC, unmodified opinion, June 8, 2026. Basis for Sections 4 and 5 and the audited headline stats. monroega.com — ACFR 2025 (PDF)