OPINION: Budget is done; time for City Council to move to next chapter

Last week’s Jackson City Council meeting wasn’t the end of the story when it comes to the City’s budget, but it did close a chapter.

That chapter was certainly an unexpectedly interesting chapter with twists and turns that aren’t usually part of the plot in previous years.

To oversimplify it but to also catch up anyone reading this column that’s ignorant of what I’m referring to: Jackson City Recorder Bobby Arnold and Mayor Scott Conger warned the City Council they’d get to look at the proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year later than usual with not a lot of time to review it before they’d would meet to potentially approve it because of a slowed process with the implementation of a new record-keeping software that’s gradually happened over the past year and still isn’t complete.

The budget committee gave it their first look two days before the Council would meet on it, and the budget committee sent it on with a recommendation to pass.

The Council instead sent it back to the budget committee because there were no provisions for capital improvements (the main thing on that list being repaving streets that need it) and they were still at a $3 million deficit.

Multiple Council members said they sent it back with the expectations that the committee would recommend trimming some of the deficit. Instead, the committee sent it back with the recommendations that the deficit would be made up from fund balance and any capital needs that will be met this year will be funded originally from fund balance but will be replenished by borrowing the money.

The budget was passed on first reading on July 12. Council member Larry Lowrance called his own “informal agenda review” meeting outside of City Hall on July 18, the day before Council approved the budget on second reading, which is what made the budget officially official.

While all of this went on, you had the secondary story in the chapter of back-and-forth conversations between City leadership and Downtown business owners of the location of the men’s homeless shelter that the Council had officially approved in May and some of the dissenters on the Council questioning if this is the time to even commit to building the shelter since it’s costing the City nearly $2 million of that $3 million deficit.

And all of this was exacerbated by a series of pieces by local television station WBBJ in which they sent e-mails of questions to the Mayor and Council wanting answers about the budget and received no response other than a confrontation between their news director, Stan Sanders, and Conger just before the first special-called meeting on June 20.

Those questions were raised by the three dissenters – Lowrance, Candace Busby and J.P. Stovall – at different times during different meetings.

Those questions turned the last few days of this process into almost a battle over people who support the City’s workers and those who don’t. Or at least that’s how it was portrayed in public statements by Conger and Council member Russ McKelvey last week.

And that progressed to the point that the dissenters felt the need to get in front of every microphone and voice recorder they could to hopefully be on record somewhere stating they weren’t against the raises but they were against an unbalanced budget.

But the chapter finally closed with Lowrance presenting a list of questions for the third time in a week, only to be interrupted by a called question and vote on the matter. The budget passed 6-3, and less than 10 seconds later, Stovall was talking aggressively to fellow Council member Marda Wallace about how that move was going to force more borrowing and a tax raise in the future before he loudly told her to “shut up” before walking away.

So having recapped all that, here are a few observations from my seat on the front row of the meetings:

• Conger should aim to have his next chief of staff in place well before the budget process begins next year. Because as much as the software transition caused this, not having someone sitting in the seat formerly occupied by Alex Reed to discuss and plan the budget with while the Mayor handled the big-picture part of running the City left a lot of questions open-ended going into that first meeting on June 20.
• Every member of the Council should commit to wanting to start looking at the numbers for the current year as early as February, and hopefully it will be a lot simpler to do that by then because the new system should be fully implemented by then. So if they’ve done their diligence of looking at the current situation, then they’ll have a point of reference when looking at future situations when they begin the budget discussions in April with the hearings with department heads.
• If a Council member has questions about the budget, they should ask the questions themselves in a public meeting and not rely on the media to ask them to save them potential negative PR because they dare ask the questions. For instance, I imagine a Council member asking questions about the price of raises for first responders is like me asking my wife questions about the price of vacation. I want to take vacation, but I need to know its impact on the budget for my household for all of the year. Nobody on the Council wants to short-change the first responders or any of the City’s workers, but it’s logical to find out the impact of the raises. But it’s a lot more respectable if you ask the questions yourself.
• Stovall is in the unenviable position he’s in of being a public figure and elected official that has the day job that he has. Being the leader of a church, he’s held to a higher standard in how he conducts himself as an example for everyone who attends his church. His confrontation with Wallace was a bad example of how he should’ve conducted himself, and I’ve been told he apologized to her in a text message later that day. Personally, I can understand how he feels because I went through Leadership Jackson with Wallace, and we were on the same team together in 2019 (which has been heralded by many official-types as the best LJ class ever). One time during a tense time during team competition, I had to shush Wallace from across the room so I could concentrate on the task at hand, and later that day in front of the whole group I apologized to her since my offense was in front of the whole group. I’d hope Stovall will be willing to apologize to Wallace publicly at their next meeting as a show of solidarity on the Council.

But like I said earlier, this was only a chapter. Now that the budget has been approved, every single one of the people who sit on that platform during these meetings – and really everyone who’s affected by this budget or wants to keep their taxes from going up – need to pray that Arnold’s projection in revenues was as conservative as he thought it was and they make up the $3 million on their own.

Otherwise, there will be a lot more chapters to this story that would either be a best seller or become the inspiration for the script of a reboot of the sitcom from a few years back, “Parks and Rec.”

I don’t think anyone wants either of those outcomes to happen.

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.