Iola’s 2021 spending plan is slowly coming into focus.
City Council members spent the better part of two hours Monday hearing budget proposals from Iola’s various department heads, with a familiar refrain.
Capital expenditures are largely flat across the board, with a bulk of the budget increases earmarked for salaries. Their proposals incorporate a recently completed wage study to up payroll by about $450,000.
And, as Interim City Administrator Corey Schinstock noted, roughly half of that pay hike can be covered with leftover reserves from the city’s employee benefit fund, put in place when Iola was self-insured.
Plus, the rest of the raises could be covered with carryover funding from within each of the departments, Schinstock said.
“I was pleasantly pleased with how the numbers came out,” Schinstock said, noting that even with the payroll increases, he anticipates the general fund to remain largely flat, (or even down a few dollars from 2020.)
The plan is to take recommendations from the Council to incorporate a few relatively minor changes — comparing the cost of hiring a full-time information technology worker vs. what the city pays for outsourcing for such services, for example — then to bring the spending proposals back to the Council for its July 13 meeting.
If the $32 million spending plan passes muster, the city would schedule it for ratification July 27.
“Overall, the budgets look pretty good,” Schinstock said, with few big-ticket purchases planned for the coming year.
As an aside, Iola has had fewer adverse effects from the ongoing COVID-19 shutdown than other places around the state, largely because Iola does not rely upon tourism funding or a large influx of college students.
“It looks like we are still fairly good with our projections,” Councilman Carl Slaugh said, noting Iola’s big budget drivers are utility sales.
Even sales tax collections are on par with 2019, Schinstock noted.
SPEAKING OF the wage study…
Councilman Mark Peters pressed Schinstock about specifics within the budget proposals, such as why some higher on the wage scale get significantly larger raises than many entry level workers.
For example, within the Police Department, the chief will get a 16% hike, and the lieutenants get 5%, and sergeants will see their pay increased 19%. However, the eight patrol officers will see their salaries remain largely flat, with a pay hike of .3%.
“How can we justify that?” Peters asked.
