As the fiscal year enters its final month, the Milledgeville city council continued their end-of-year tradition of weekly meetings Tuesday to discuss plans and funding for the upcoming year.
One of the first topics discussed was the potential raise for all official city employees, with a four percent versus a flat raise across all departments being the starting point.
“There would be no one outside of the police department and fire department that would get more than a $4,000 increase in salary. There are some that are in the $3,400 to $3,500 range, but no one other than those two would get more than $4,000,” said city manager Hank Griffeth.
District three representative Denese Shinholster expressed her disproval of a four percent increase, as she said it would only further widen the pay gap between the fire and police departments and the rest of the employees of the city. The issue with a flat $4,000 raise, Griffith said, would be finding the funding to go through with it without taking too big of a hit in the general budget for the city. There may, however, be a way to give the city more time to acquire funding to keep a flat raise through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) that was given out during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think using the ARPA piece helps with a couple of things. It gets money in people’s pockets right away, and it also buys us some time to sort out a way to restructure our retirement plans we offer in the future,” said Griffeth.
The next topic of interest was the need for a civil engineer, as the city currently contracts an engineering firm for projects and does not have one on staff for the city itself.
“If we can offset the cost, it would be nice to have someone who you can say ‘I need this done and I need it done now’ as opposed to contracting through a firm because we have to go through passing it and then they have to get around to sending someone out,” said District Six representative Steve Chambers.
After some deliberation on the what the duties of a civil engineer would be, how they would be significantly different than other positions in the city, and how much it would cost to have an employee like that, the group chose to hold off on making a decision until a later date. This period would allow more research to be done into the area and potential personnel, as that would help each member decide if spending the money they would need for someone with that position would be worth it.
Once the discussions on different budget topics were finished, the council briefly went into a closed meeting before adjourning. After several weeks of weekly budget meetings, the group will not be meeting next Tuesday, June 7, and will instead meet the following Tuesday, June 14, at 5:30 p.m.