City Council pushes budget vote to following week

It will be Monday before the Jackson City budget will be approved on the first reading.

The Jackson City Council had a special-called meeting on Thursday, June 20, to discuss the budget and give it a first approval then meet again a week later and approve it on second reading.

But nearly every City Council member expressed frustration in not getting a copy of the budget to look over until last week to look at.

“I just haven’t had enough time to sufficiently look this over and make a good decision,” said Candace Busby.

City Recorder Bobby Arnold explained a number of small details to the Council so they could know about the info going into the vote.

Here are a few things members of the Council discussed:

Projected expenses exceed projected revenue by about $3 million. The projected $95 million budget is to cover $98 million in expenses. Arnold said he’s confident that the revenue projection is conservative and they’ll exceed that.

There is no money budgeted for road resurfacing. In recent years, road resurfacing dollars have come from money that came from the federal level. Without that money coming in this year, that was not budgeted this time around.

When asked about that by Councilman J.P. Stovall, Mayor Scott Conger said they were delayed in putting the budget together because of difficulties initiating a new record-keeping software for the entire city, so as they put the budget together, they focused on operations before looking at capital expenses.

Council member Marda Wallace expressed frustration at that notion because “I’ve been involved for five years in improving our infrastructure, and to see there’s no money budgeted for this is something that I can’t vote for if there’s nothing in the budget for this.”

After more than 90 minutes of discussion and still having many questions – and after making sure it was legal to do this with City Attorney Lewis Cobb – the Council voted to go into recess and reconvene a few minutes later in work session so they could ask questions of all the department heads.

As of early Thursday afternoon, they went into a lunch recess and were set to reconvene for more discussion after lunch. Check jacksonpost.news for more information from the discussions.

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news