City Council passes $5.7 million budget
The City Council passed a $5.7 million budget for fiscal year 2023 that includes funding for a new police officer, a full-time employee at the Olney Convenience Station, and pay raises for the city administrators and employees.
The Council passed the budget on a vote of 5-0, with Councilmember Chuck Stennett absent, at a noontime meeting on Sept. 30 - the final day of the 2022 fiscal year. The city has scrimped in previous years’ budgets to save about $1 million in a rainy day fund, and councilmembers wrangled for weeks in budget-making sessions to balance a $60,000 revenue shortfall and to protect the surplus while attending to looming infrastructure and service needs.
“The takeaway story is we are not spending money on capital expense, we are spending it on people - training and retention and getting them up to fair market prices,” Mayor Pro Tem Tom Parker said after the meeting. He praised Mrs. Hourigan’s and Mrs.
Pagsuberon’s “expertise in putting a budget together in a much shorter time with much less heavy lifting by the Council.”
Most of the city’s general fund revenue comes from property ($875,000) and sales ($450,000) tax revenues; intergovernmental grants ($767,800); and garbage services ($483,073), the fiscal year 2023 budget showed. The city also earns revenue from utility services ($2.5 million) and Olney Airport ($88,100). Last fiscal year, the city collected $3.8 million in revenue and spent about $3.4 million, but it had expected to collect $4.25 million, the fiscal year 2022 budget showed.
The 2022 fiscal year has ended with a surplus of approximately $200,000 that will roll over to the next fiscal year for critical infrastructure improvement projects.
Although Young County Commissioners approved 10-percent across-the-board pay raises last month to retain county employees and keep their paychecks ahead of inflation, the Olney City Council gave 5 percent raises to City Administrator Arpegea Pagsuberon, City Secretary Tammy Hourigan, and Police Chief Dan Birbeck. The budget also includes funds for up to 6 percent raises cost-of-living and merit-based raises for city staff. “It’s what we could afford,” Mayor Rue Rogers said.
The new police officer will bring the Olney Police Department to nine full-time officers, allowing two officers to patrol during “prime times when we are seeing the most calls in the city,” Olney, Chief Birbeck said.
“The plan will be to utilize that officer to have dual coverage to be able to have a more safe and effective response to it,” he said. “In addition, whenever one officer is distracted with one thing the other officer can remain focused on interdiction and crime prevention. [Our canine unit] will move to a five-day shift and those days will be alternating people so won’t know when we have a canine on.”
The Council faces some new budgeting challenges this fiscal year: they will have an approximately $700,000 principal-and-interest payment on the $13 million in revenue bonds for a new water treatment plant. They have promised to replace the 70-year-old municipal swimming pool complex, which closed last year over safety concerns.
The Council expects to spend more in the coming fiscal year on insurance – general, public, and building liability insurance, as well as vehicle and employee health insurance, the budget shows. They budgeted $44,000 for street maintenance – up 10 percent from the $40,000 planned for last year though only $8,000 was spent, the budget showed. They also bumped up the line item for energy costs by 20 percent.
The Council also added funds to maintain the roads at Lake Olney, which residents said had become nearly impassable.
The Police Department budget increased significantly over last year’s planned expenditures, mainly due to an increase in salaries for the new officer and raises for current officers. Funds that had been redistributed in last year’s budget were returned to the municipal court line item to hire a new city clerk to assume the duties that Mrs. Pagsuberon had been handling in addition to her job as Interim City Administrator, the budget showed. Code enforcement also got a big budget bump, as officers take on food service inspections this year and move to condemn derelict properties in accordance with the city’s plan to develop more housing.
The Olney Volunteer Fire Department also got a $21,000 budget hike for vehicle maintenance and fire equipment and supplies, while the Parks & Recreation Department saw its budget rise by about $27,000 to fund a new full-time employee as well as funds for raises to promote workforce retention.