The city council on Wednesday approved a $29.3 million budget for the next fiscal year, including roughly $340,000 in raises for various positions.
As well as several special increases to specific positions, the budget includes a 3% raise across the board, totaling about $300,000, that will apply to 264 city employees, Chief Financial Officer Jim Brigham told The Dispatch.
Just before the council approved the budget during its work session Wednesday, Jason Spears, councilman for Ward 6, proposed reallocating $20,000 from a $50,000 line item originally meant for youth programs to help offset the cost of pay increases.
“If we got to where we could offset some of that money (for raises) we have to take out of our unrestricted cash, it’s already here in the budget by a significant dollar amount if we chose to do it that way,” Spears said during the meeting.
Alternatively, Spears suggested the $20,000 could be reallocated specifically to the care and maintenance department to help cover several project requests that are still up in the air, like installing new electrical outlets at the East Columbus Gym for example.
“That money I feel like – while you may have programs or something that might be in mind (for it) – could be reduced to meet some of the existing needs and other departments throughout the city,” Spears said.
Brigham pushed back on that, saying the money needs to be in the city’s special projects fund so it’s more easily controlled.
“The problem with putting it into a department is, then I have allocated (to) that department and (it) can go ahead and spend it,” Brigham said. “If you keep it in special projects, hopefully we don’t spend it. But if we do spend it, it’s going to be because it’s one of (the council’s) projects.”
Brigham said he was fine with reducing the line item by $20,000, as he said it would result in the city spending less of its cash reserves.
Spears moved to approve the budget, with the contingency that the line item be reduced by $20,000 to help offset the cost of raises, and the vote was unanimous.
New positions, equipment included
The budget also includes four new positions, including a public information officer, an administrative assistant to the chief operations officer and city attorney, a city planner and Action Center clerk, with the salaries and benefits of all four totaling about $387,450, Brigham said.
The council included targeted raises for several sitting positions. Hourly pay for a Columbus Police Department animal control supervisor will increase from $15 to $17.
In the public works department, pay for a custodian increased from $15 to $16 per hour, and two laborers were promoted to crew leaders, increasing their hourly pay from $15 to $16.
There’s an increase included for a full-time maintenance technician at Trotter Convention Center from $15 to $16. In the care and maintenance team, there is an increase for a full-time maintenance technician from $17.66 to $18.50.
For the city garage, there’s an increase for an assistant garage superintendent/mechanic from $20.15 to $22, as well as increasing the salary of the garage superintendent from $60,396.70 to $65,000.
The council also upped the salary for the public works director from about $66,465 to $80,000, and the advertised salary for a Columbus Fire and Rescue assistant chief, a position the city is looking to fill, from $71,222 to $80,000.
The new budget this year will not come with a tax increase; the council last week voted to leave the rate at 53 mills.
However, the city will have to dip into its cash reserves to fund the purchase of about $650,000 worth of new equipment for public works, including a mini excavator, a bucket truck and a leaf vacuum truck.
The equipment will cost about $650,000 total, but the city will be covering $516,000 of that with its cash reserves, which Brigham projected will total about $5 million on Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year.
The city will be pulling an additional $1 million from the reserves to go toward completing the Sen. Terry Brown Amphitheater on The Island.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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