A $15 per hour minimum wage for full-time city employees looks to be just one council vote from becoming reality.
Council members discussing it at a budget hearing Thursday made it sound like a done deal.
“This is major,” said Vice Mayor and Ward 2 Councilman Joseph Mickens, who presided over the hearing at City Hall. “… It might not seem like much to me, to you or to some more in here that’s got a nice income coming in. But when you can put an extra $100 into a family of four, trust me, that can go a long way.”
The council challenged Chief Financial Officer Jim Brigham last week at its first hearing on the Fiscal Year 2025 budget to find a way to raise every full time employee to at least $15 an hour. By Thursday, he had succeeded, news that prompted Ward 4 Councilman Pierre Beard to look up toward the courtroom ceiling and applaud.
“My colleague’s over here clapping,” Mickens said. “He’s just giddy.”
“I’ll tell you, Vice Mayor, it made me giddy at 2:30 in the morning when I finally figured it out,” Brigham responded.
He said 56 employees working 40-hour weeks make less than the target rate, most of whom sit at $13.27 an hour and are poised to receive a $3,600 annual raise. The lowest paid makes $12.87, Chief Operations Officer Jammie Garrett told the council last week.
This will not create a situation where any supervisor is making the same or less than a subordinate, Brigham told The Dispatch after the meeting.
Counting pay and benefits, Brigham told the council, it will take an extra $300,000 to bring them all up to $15 an hour.
Instead of adding to the ad valorem tax rate, Brigham adjusted several revenue line items to add $560,000 to the income side of the budget.
He is now projecting a 4% increase in sales tax revenue, up $100,000 from what he said last week he expects the city to collect next year. Changing the city’s depository institution to Regions Bank, which will pay the city 4% on its deposits, should also increase expected interest earnings by at least $250,000, he said.
“That’s almost double what we were getting from our previous bank arrangement,” Brigham said.
Brigham also added $210,000 in parks and landfill revenue to the budget, noting he is comfortable those departments will meet those marks next year. He told The Dispatch after the meeting he did not include that revenue in the budget he presented last week.
The proposed budget also includes 3% raises for every salaried and 40-hour wage employee who already makes at least $15 an hour. The council in July updated the pay scale for hourly fire and police officers that increased their wages by 6%, and since those positions require more than 2,080 hours a year (40 hours a week), they were not considered eligible for the $15 an hour minimum wage.
Also included in the budget are three new positions: a part-time building inspector, a public information officer/administrative assistant to the COO and a city planner.
While Mickens emphasized how much he believed the $15 hourly wage would help the lowest-paid city employees, he told department heads Thursday to relay to them a warning.
“I want you to go back and tell them, ‘To whom much is given, much is required,’ Mickens said. “We expect for them to earn that. Ain’t no slack coming now. We don’t want to see them sitting out under trees with people driving by all the time.”
The council will adopt the budget Sept. 3. If approved the raises would be effective Oct. 1, when the new fiscal year begins.
Outside appropriations
With Brigham’s changes, the proposed budget now projects revenue of $28,478,000 against expenditures of $27,910,918.
That leaves an expected surplus of $567,087.
All that’s left to sort at this point are appropriations to outside organizations.
Brigham included $810,000 in outside appropriations in the proposed budget. However, Garrett said organizations requested a cumulative $192,000 in increases that, if approved, would whittle down the projected surplus.
The city came into Thursday with a pair of one-time requests to handle – a $10,000 sponsorship for the Columbus Air Force Base Thunder Over Columbus air show in September and a request of $54,000 from the Columbus Cultural Heritage Foundation to match a grant to renovate the Tennessee Williams Home and Welcome Center.
The council approved the CAFB request Thursday and debited the expense from the FY 2024 budget. Garrett said if the council approves the grant match for CCHF, she is hopeful that can also come out of this year’s budget.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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