After four nights of budget sessions in a row, Washington’s City Council ended up with a balanced budget, albeit one that differs from the proposed budget submitted by City Manager Brian Alligood last month.

The 2015-2016 fiscal year budget crafted by the City Council does not raise the city’s property-tax rate. Alligood’s proposed budget called for increasing the property-tax rate by 1.5 cents to 51.5 cents per $100 valuation. That would have increased the annual taxes on a $100,000 house from $500 to $515.

To avoid increasing the tax rate, to pay for a 1.3 percent cost-of-living adjustment for city employees (total cost of $95,000) and add an additional $15,000 for EMS medical supplies, the council decided to increase the transfer from the electric fund to the general fund from $470,000 to $656,399. That increase in the transfer amount also covers a $76,000 “shortfall” between revenues and expenses in the proposed budget after the council trimmed about $44,000 from the proposed budget.

Alligood’s proposed property-tax rate increase of 1.5 cents per $100 valuation would have generated about $120,000. By trimming the proposed budget’s expenditures by about $44,000, that left the $76,000 shortfall. Instead of increasing the property-tax rate by a penny per $100,000 to generate enough revenue to cover that shortfall, the council opted to increase the transfer from the electric fund.

Increasing that transfer did not please Councilman Doug Mercer, who said the other council members were returning to “milking that cash cow.”

In recent years, the council decreased the annual transfer from the electric fund to the general fund from about $1.1 million to $470,000 (the current fiscal year).

That annual transfer fell from $1,174,619 in fiscal year 2010 to $470,000 in fiscal year 2014, according to the audit performed by Martin Starnes & Associates. The council has been working toward reducing that annual transfer for several years, with the goal of eliminating that transfer. The transfers have been made to help balance past city budgets.

The council’s budget work is not over. It will conduct a public hearing on the proposed budget at 6 p.m. May 11 during its regularly scheduled meeting. The council likely will vote on adopting the budget at its June 8 meeting.