Hello Neighbors,
I understand there has been some talk around town about a story wherein KTVO reported the city council supposedly approved a $1,500 “Christmas bonus” to city employees.
First of all, that is not true. We gave no Christmas bonus. Unfortunately, the inaccurate article has caused a great deal of misunderstanding. What we did, in a nutshell, was give a discretionary bonus to all city employees IN LIEU OF our customary cost of living increase in salaries. The money came from a $210,000 legal settlement with the phone companies over a cell phone tax – not the General Fund.
This was to save the taxpayers money – at the expense of our city employees, who certainly deserve better.
We do try our best to be good stewards of the public dollars we are given to work with. Unfortunately, the budget is unusually tight for next year. We have a number of unavoidable big-ticket items coming up, and we are already hardly able to fund the many necessary transportation, maintenance, and other projects planned for the future. We are also still uncertain how the recession is going to affect our current figures for the projected cost of these items, which is what we base our budget on.
Because of these and many more factors, we were unable to confidently commit to even the most basic, customary across-the-board Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) wage increases we would have preferred to give. But we feel our employees deserve at least something to try to cover inflation and rising costs, so a one-time payment was the best we could come up with using the resources we have. Supplemental Security Income (SSI) alone increased 5.8% this year, so this is definitely more of a “band-aid” than a “bonus.”
I believe that part of being a good steward of public money is looking at the whole picture and into the future. I believe that raises would have been better, and I think I can speak for the entire council when I say that we would definitely have preferred a wage increase over the “bonuses”. If you look at how much we pay our city employees, versus how much other cities of similar size pay theirs, you would probably consider ours underpaid as it is. I would like to change this eventually, but it’s impossible to do at this time.
Wishing Happy Holidays to you and your family,
Todd