KIRKSVILLE, MO. -- The Kirksville 2010 city budget is one step closer to getting approval.
Monday night the city council approved a first reading of the budget in their regular meeting by a vote of four to one. They also voted to amend the budget to include a two percent pay increase for city employees.
Richard Detweiler was the lone opposing vote. Detweiler says he won't vote to support a budget that includes the pay increase.
“I think the city employees are underpaid, but we cannot do this in the face of what other people in this community are having to deal with. We just can't,” Detweiler said.
Detweiler tells KTVO that since the city pays for its employees’ health insurance benefits, a cost that is set to increase 10 percent next year, he thinks that increase is the same as a pay raise.
Council member Todd Kuhns supports the pay raise and says now is the time to do it.
“I hope skeptical citizens will look at the greater picture and not just today. If you look at the last 10 years we have been notoriously poor at keeping our city employees' pay up at the level that the rest of the world is doing with their cost of living increase,” said Kuhns.
He says that since the cost of living is not increasing this year, a pay raise for city employees will help make up some of the gap that’s been created in the last ten years.
City Manager Mari Macomber says the money to pay for the pay raise comes from several places.
“It's a combination of additional revenues that came in and expenditures that the departments did not make last year. And then when you looked at their budgets for this year, they did not increase their operating budgets for this coming year very significantly,” Macomber said.
The council will vote on the second reading of the 2010 budget on Dec. 21. If it passes that vote, it will be officially adopted.
Copies of the proposed budget have been available for citizens to review at city hall since November. So far, no citizens have come by to review it.
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