The city council met again to discuss the budget for the upcoming fiscal year Tuesday evening, but with a notable absence. District Six representative Steve Chambers sat in the seat of Mayor Mary Parham-Copelan, as the mayor unfortunately had business to attend to that prevented her from being at the meeting.
Leading the discussion was City Manager Hank Griffeth, who began the meeting by discussing different ways to acquire extra funds which would allow increases in salary for the employees of the city.
“These increases in salary for staff across the board would be funded by general funds, water and sewer and solid waste,” said Griffeth.
Griffeth also read a request from Chief of Police Dray Swicord for a 10 percent increase in salaries for all sworn officers in the police department. If approved, Griffeth says it will put the starting salary for an officer at $40,377.45.
A new service vehicle for building inspections was also requested, however, Griffeth says there are enough funds leftover from the 2012 Special Purpose Local Option Sales
Tax (SPLOST) to easily cover the expenses, which would be around $30,000.
The most extensive topic that took up a majority of the meeting was about salary of city employees and the benefits and retirement plans that are available to them.
“We need to be in a position where we are either competitive all the time, or we are setting the standard,” said Chambers. “I prefer the latter, but I’m also up for being competitive, otherwise we are behind.”
One point of contention in the desire to increase the salary is how it would affect the current retirement and savings plans that the city currently offers its employees. The group mentioned that many people are focusing solely on the amount in their paycheck and not the resources they will have later in life.
“When I have a conversation with employees, our staff talks about how Putnam County pays more than us, but Putnam does not provide 100 percent of their retirement,” said District Three representative Denese Shinholster. “Even though they are paying more salary, you are losing more benefits, which is why I think it is important to show them the breakdown of their benefits because that is when they see that they are worth more working here in Milledgeville.”
Shinholster went on to suggest if employees were able to receive some of their benefits at the end of each calendar year, that would help them more easily connect their invaluableness to the city.
After discussing each of his main points with the council, Griffeth said that although they would have to go through each request and figure out exact numbers on how everything would work, he and the council were confident they would be able to make the right adjustments to get everything the funding it needed.