OPINION: Better communication would’ve improved budget process

Last year about this time, Madison County Commission was wrapping up its budget process, and it had been an ugly one as there was plenty of strife between part of the Commission and Jackson-Madison County Schools leadership.

Apparently miscommunication – or lack of understanding – between Superintendent Marlon King and Finance Director Karen Bell led King to believe the JMCSS budget didn’t need to be in before May 1.

The first draft of the budget was ultimately sent on June 3, rejected two days later, sent again, rejected by the full board before ultimately being approved toward the end of the month.

This paper had a column expressing a hope that in the following year (this year) there would be more communication in the beginning and throughout the budgeting process.

The addition of former commissioner Jason Compton, now on the school board, as JMCSS budget committee chairman reopened the communication lines as he and vice-chair Sherry Franks attended the budget committee meetings as often as County department heads.

Anytime a committee member had a question, Compton and/or Franks either answered or sought the answer and responded to budget chair Carl Alexander as soon as possible. They also possibly broke the record for the earliest time submitting their budget as it was sent this year    on April 22.

And everything between the school board and county commission was great this year. It was so great that the budget committee forgot to put a line item expense in the school system budget, and they went back and put it in because, according to committee member Joey Hale, “we told them we would approve that for them, so it needs to be included.”

While there wasn’t much drama this year about the budget itself, a couple of conversations came up that were reported on last week as a couple of elected officials – Mayor A.J. Massey and Trustee Billy Burkhead – asked for raises for their employees that were more than the 3 percent across the board raises the commission had committed to.

Massey and Burkhead’s arguments were logical. Massey had one employee that has been working for 25 years that he feels deserves a raise and another employee who didn’t get a raise last year and he feels that employee should get a make-up raise. Burkhead wanted to catch his employees up to the pay that other County employees in other departments with similar responsibilities were making.

At the beginning of the budget process, Alexander sent an e-mail to all department heads letting them know budget hearings were coming up so they needed to get their requests together. He specifically said don’t make requests for raises because the committee was trying to make the numbers work to get each department the money for a 3 percent increase in payroll across the board (although he says his wording in the e-mail was “we’re working something out” and didn’t indicate what the goal was).

Then word got out that three departments – fire, maintenance and county commission administration – all got bigger raises. Maintenance and county commission were promised bigger raises last year for this year by the committee, and fire department received training that certified them for more services that warranted higher pay according to the committee.

On multiple occasions, Massey has asked for the rules of the game and if it was possible to do whatever the department heads of the three that got larger raises without receiving a definitive answer as to why they got the raises and he didn’t.

And this hasn’t had a good look from the beginning. There were three days of budget hearings on April 15, 17 and 19, but public notification of those hearings went out until the afternoon of April 17, a notification went out about the April 19 hearing. A lot was going on within the offices over that messaging getting out including family emergencies and deaths, and the notion that the notices fell through the cracks is a believable one.

But the public had no prior knowledge of the hearings, and department heads typically go to the entire hearing and listen to what other department heads are asking for.

Then the turmoil within the finance department didn’t help anything, and that will be a situation to watch going forward as the people who manned the top four positions in that department are either gone or will be gone on June 28.

But maybe one piece of communication that could’ve been made might’ve been letting all department heads know something like this, “We’re working on a raise package for everyone so that no department is left of this pay increase. However, if y’all start talking to each other, just know that three departments were previously approved last year for bigger raises, so everybody’s getting at least a certain percentage raise, but a few are getting bigger ones.”

I’m sure someone who’s been involved with this for much longer than the six years I’ve been covering it will have plenty of reasons why that wouldn’t work, which is fine, but hopefully they have another suggestion they can try next year.

Will the budgeting process ever be easy and simple? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to improve the process each year.

Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Contact him at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on X.com @JSEditorBrandon or Instagram @Editorbrandon.