Jackson City Council continues current budget; new deadline is Aug. 31

Jackson Mayor Scott Conger hoped to get two approvals in the final week of June for the 2024-25 City budget by the City Council.

The discussion started with Councilman Frank McMeen making a motion to send the budget back to budget committee, which McMeen is the chairman of.

Russ McKelvey and Richard Donnell questioned why he’d want to make that move since the budget committee went over the budget on June 18.

McMeen’s explanation was they have more information now than they did a week earlier, and most of that information came from the impromptu work session they had on June 20 when the Council declined to approve the budget the first time.

After a little more than three total hours of meeting in that work session and hearing from all department heads, McMeen felt like all the Council members had more information – mainly himself and other Council members on the budget committee including Johnny Dodd and Julie Holt – and hopefully that information is enough for them to put a budget together more in line with the projected revenues that they and their constituents would be more comfortable with.

Sending back to committee on June 24 almost automatically would mean the City couldn’t have its budget officially ratified before the June 30 deadline. It also negated the need to have a special-called council meeting on June 27. This lead to discussion of what would happen if there’s not a budget passed by June 30.

Donnell and Larry Lowrance both said they spoke with people from the state Comptroller’s office to get insight into the repercussions of filing a budget continuance.

A continuance is essentially continuing to operate on the same budget the City is operating on now through Aug. 31. Then the Council would have two more months to get a new budget passed.

According to the Comptroller, a continuance wouldn’t reflect poorly on the City or its credit rating because the state knows that not every municipality will pass their budget on time every year.

Julie Holt asked City Recorder Bobby Arnold what the most impactful results of a continuance would be.

Arnold told her that the main impact would be on employees who are set to receive raises. A two-month delay in the budget means a two-month delay in those employees receiving their raises.

After eight minutes of discussion, J.P. Stovall called for the question, which would’ve forced a vote. Members of the Council including Holt, McKelvey and Donnell expressed their disagreement to call the question so quickly in the discussion. Five members voted to call the question. Then they voted right after that and voted to send the budget back to committee.

Originally Markeisha Johnson, the administrative secretary for the Council, announced that the vote was 5-1 in favor of sending the budget back with three abstaining. One of the three who didn’t vote – Donnell – said his wasn’t necessarily an effort by him to not vote.

“This just came together too fast for me, and I don’t like the way it was done,” Donnell said.

After the vote, Conger said they had the option to adjourn and then go into work session to talk again with department heads, which they could and did.

A lot of the discussion was about the possibility of raising taxes early on after Stovall made a statement that he was against raising taxes, to which McKelvey replied with “Everybody is.”

McKelvey then volunteered to give a history lesson for those who needed it, saying the City did a salary study in 2022 and saw how far behind a lot of their employees are in their standard of pay compared to their counterparts at other cities of similar size.

In response to that, the City Council gave every employee who’d been with the City more than a year a sizable bump in pay.

Two years ago, the City had the chance to raise property tax rates, but the Council declined to do that.

“We made those decisions, and the check is coming due now,” McKelvey said.

Marda Wallace said she received a number of texts over the weekend concerned that the Council was looking into cutting salary costs on the employees.

“I want to take that off the table publicly right now, and I want to take raising taxes off the table right now,” Wallace said. “We can’t ask the citizens for a tax increase when I feel like the City hasn’t done the best job it can do in keeping costs down.”

Arnold explained to the Council how street paving has been funded in recent years. Each of the past four years before the current fiscal year has seen substantial growth in sales tax revenue from $17 million in 2020 to $39 million in 2023 with jumps of at least $7 million each year in between.

That plus grant funding from federal dollars for the specific use of street paving has funded resurfacing of city streets.

The current year is seeing a flat rate with maybe a 1 percent increase in sales tax, which means there’s not extra funds to put into the street resurfacing fund with no grants being awarded to Jackson this year either.

While no one said they’re in favor of raising taxes, Dodd says it appears they’re getting to a point where they need to figure something out. Stovall said surely they can find a way to fix roads and cut the budget. Wallace wanted to hear a plan to fix the roads.

Lowrance still wanted to know why the expenses have increased by $15 million in the last two years and none of that has gone toward paving roads.

The discussion began to shift to the men’s homeless shelter. Wallace asked Conger if it’s possible to approve one project and allocate those funds, to which Conger said he thought that might be possible.

If so, that would possibly be moving $1.7 million of City funds back into the current year’s budget. Conger said after the meeting that would have to be decided at a future Council meeting. But if it were approved, that money would come from the recently dissolved TIF district at Exit 85.

The meeting ended with McMeen, Holt and Dodd – the Council members on the budget committee – discussing with Conger when to possibly have a committee meeting. Later that morning, it was decided that meeting would be held Thursday morning when the special called Council meeting would’ve happened.

Attendance report: Every Council member was present for this meeting.

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news