Jackson City Budget: The situation going into Monday morning's Council meeting
Editor's note: This story has been edited since original publication.
The Jackson City Council is set to meet Monday morning at 9 a.m. with the hopes of approving on first reading the budget for fiscal year 2024-25.
The City is behind on the schedule for normally getting this done.
In recent years, the first reading approval happens in the June monthly meeting, which was June 4, and the second reading typically happens in a special-called meeting about a week later.
The City’s transfer to a new software system that handles nearly every facet of the day-to-day business has been the one to receive the blame for the lateness to this year’s budget schedule.
The department heads appeared before members of the Council in April for budget hearings, and the City’s finance department, headed up by City Recorder Bobby Arnold, have put the budget together.
The City Council is required to approve the budget on two readings before June 30 because the fiscal year begins on July 1.
If for some reason the Council doesn’t approve the budget twice before June 30, the state Comptroller’s office will issue a continuance, which means the City will continue to operate on its current budget, but it has a deadline of Aug. 31 to turn in a new budget for the final 10 months of the year.
As of now, in addition to Monday’s special-called meeting, there’s another one scheduled for Thursday at 9 a.m. So assuming the budget is approved on first reading on Monday, the City can still avoid the continuance.
Here’s a look at how the City got into this situation according to various members of the City Council:
The first version of the budget was e-mailed to the City Council on June 10.
The second version was sent two days later, on June 12.
A problem with that sending of the budget was that the file was too large according to some Council members for them to open, so they didn’t get a chance to see it.
A third version of the budget was sent about 2:20 p.m. on Monday, June 17 (“about 2:20 p.m.” is used because different Council members’ e-mails have different time stamps on when they received the budget, but they fall between 2:20 and 2:25 p.m.).
This gave the members who hadn’t seen any version of the budget a total of 66.5 hours to look the budget over – assuming they didn’t sleep or do anything else before the meeting on Thursday morning.
The budget they received had a budget of nearly $98 million based on funding of $95 million.
When speaking before the Council on Thursday, Arnold said the revenue projections for the City for the upcoming year he felt were conservative and the $3 million difference between expenses and funds would probably be made up by June 30 of 2025.
But to avoid the situation of hoping for a revenue surplus, there are three things they could do – cut the budget even more, raise taxes or borrow money.
The City is currently in debt at $52 million, which is down from previous years. It was at $78 million when Conger first took office as Mayor in 2019.
One key conversation that happened Thursday was when Council member Marda Wallace brought up that street resurfacing had no money budgeted for it.
In the past three years, the money for that has come from federal funds allocated to the City. Those funds aren’t coming to the City this year, and with the City employees being behind on putting the budget together, they haven’t had time to look at a funding source for resurfacing.
So when they were putting the budget together in the weeks leading up to these meetings, Mayor Scott Conger said they made the decision to focus on operations instead of capital investments to keep the City’s day-to-day business going.
Wallace and J.P. Stovall expressed disagreement with this decision, and Wallace went as far as to say she would not be able to vote to approve the budget if the basic services of the City like taking care of roads wouldn’t be taken care of.
The majority of the Council members said they were uncomfortable with voting on the budget at the time, and Conger offered the option – once they made sure with City Attorney Lewis Cobb this option was legal – to convert their meeting to a public work session so the department heads could discuss their budget requests with the Council again.
This wound up going on nearly all day with the initial council meeting starting at 9 a.m., recessing about 10:30 and coming back to work session about 15 minutes later, hour recess at noon and then more work session until 2:30 p.m.
The main point of contention after the lunch recess was when the men’s homeless shelter was discussed. It’s currently set to be constructed on McCorry Street at a total cost of $3.4 million with $1.7 million coming from grants and the other $1.7 million coming from City funds to cover the rest of the cost.
Councilman Larry Lowrance asked what would happen if the City decided at this point not to build it in a hypothetical situation, but Innovation Chief Lauren Kirk pointed out that the Council voted on the guaranteed maximum price for the facility at their May meeting, which led to the City entering into various contracts with the contractor – Henson Construction – and some of their vendors who’ve signed on already.
Council member Candace Busby has asked for the shelter to be put on the July 2 monthly meeting agenda to ensure Downtown businesses have their voices heard in the process in a public meeting.
Different members of the Council have questions they’ve tried to get answered Friday and over the weekend while looking over the budget, and they’ll try on Monday to get them answered if they’re not before then.
Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news
