STARKVILLE — The mayor and aldermen are passing up raises next fiscal year, instead dedicating that money toward the police department’s camera request.
During Tuesday night’s board meeting, aldermen held the first public hearing for the city’s Fiscal Year 2025 tax millage and budget. While it included no tax increase, the proposed budget reflected money aldermen shuffled around during its Friday work session to buy 20 police cameras and hire two additional personnel to monitor them.
The original budget draft only included money for 10 cameras and one new person, with the police department $140,000 short of its full request for next fiscal year.
Roughly $100,000 for the police cameras came from the city’s capital outlay fund, which Ward 2 Alderwoman and budget chair Sandra Sistrunk told The Dispatch would delay the installation of traffic cameras for the city’s signalization project. Another $30,000 came from funds dedicated to “unreimbursable” expenses like training and equipment that would come along with reopening Fire Station 5, if the city receives a Federal Emergency Management Agency SAFER grant to fund nine salaries of the firefighters that will staff it over the three years.
“There’s no match,” Sistrunk said. “It’s just for expenses the SAFER grant won’t cover.”
Sistrunk said Friday the city had not received approval for the grant.
The rest came from a proposed delay of the mayor and board of aldermen’s raises to July 1, 2025.
By delaying those raises by nine months, from the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1 until the next board took office, Sistrunk said the city would save “less than $5,000 in delayed expenses.”
“This was not big money. This was a principle thing, from my standpoint,” Mayor Lynn Spruill said. “We had already given ourselves a raise this term, and I felt it was appropriate to save the next one for the next board.”
City Chief Operating Officer and Director of Human Resources Navarrete Ashford said the raises were initially calculated during a salary survey including all employees, and he compared the salary of the board to other similarly sized cities with similar budgets.
The board would be getting roughly a 1.5% raise, Sistrunk said, which she said was not enough to “move the needle” on the city’s budget, but it would make the next set of raises an “arms length” transaction for the next board.
“It’s another couple thousand dollars,” Sistrunk said. “It won’t buy another camera.”
Ward 5 Alderman Hamp Beatty asked Sistrunk how much the raises for the mayor and the board would equal for the whole year. Sistrunk said for 12 months, aldermen raises would equal about $3,000, and for the mayor, the raise would equal $7,000.
“Well, that’ll buy a camera,” Spruill said.
Sistrunk moved to approve the delayed July start date for the raises, but the board voted down the change 4-3, with Vice Mayor and Ward 6 Alderman Roy A. Perkins, Ward 7 Alderman Henry Vaughn, Ward 1 Alderwoman Kim Moreland and Beatty voting against.
After the first vote failed, Spruill asked what the board wanted to do for raises instead, since raises for the first nine months of the year had already been removed from the budget to balance it.
Sistrunk then suggested removing any pay raises for the mayor and board of aldermen from the budget, reclassifying those funds to the police camera line. The vote to give up raises for the next fiscal year passed unanimously.
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