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Benton near balanced budget |
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Wednesday, 16 December 2009 |
The Benton City Council’s Finance Committee on Tuesday moved to send the proposed 2010 budget to the full City Council for approval at its meeting next Monday, bringing Benton one step closer to having its first balanced budget in nearly seven years.
The budget does not include pay raises for city employees but does include a provision that will require city employees to begin contributing an additional $25 per month for their health insurance plans. Currently, employees pay nothing toward individual policies and $225 per month for family policies.
The proposal to require city employees to contribute the $25 per month has been approved by three autonomous bodies that also include city employees: the Public Utilities Commission, the Parks Commission and the Advertising and Promotion Commission.
A motion at Tuesday’s meeting by Alderman David Sparks to kill the insurance contribution provision failed with a vote of 5-3.
The insurance contribution will save the city about $51,000. In all, the 2010 budget reduced expenditures by about $800,000, Finance Committee Chairman Jerry Ponder has said.
Some of those cuts come in the form of public safety personnel.
Two vacant positions in the Benton Fire Department and two in the police department will not be filled under the 2010 budget, officials have said. That translates into $152,000 in savings in the fire department and $160,000 in the police department.
The rest of the budget cuts come from eliminating capital expenditures for next year and reducing operating costs wherever possible, officials have said.
Ponder plans to present the $10.4 million budget to the full council on Monday.
The city needs to balance its budget for 2010 because the economy — and sales tax revenue — has slowed, and the city has no reserve fund on which to fall back on, explained Ponder.
“For each of the past two years, the city has had expenditures that exceeded revenues by more than $600,000,” he explained. “If you live that way for extended period of time you eventually can no longer function and can no longer pay all the bills you owe, which is where city was in 2003 when it laid off 19 people.”
So in order to avoid having to lay off anyone this year or next, the city is balancing its budget now, Ponder said.
He acknowledged Tuesday that after seeing November’s sales tax revenue numbers — which were up over last year — that things were not as dire as they had appeared several months ago.
“I’m very happy, very pleased about the November financial statement and where we are right now,” he said. Mentioning the layoffs by the city of Little Rock, employee furloughs in Hot Springs, and state tax revenues through November down 11 percent year-to-date, he added, “I have no idea what has insulated Benton from the carnage around us, but I’m grateful.”
Still, Ponder warned that with cities all around Benton and the state suffering financially, it is better to be safe than sorry when formulating the city’s budget for next year.
In other business Tuesday, the Finance Committee did not have to take money from the police department’s fund to pay for the special election held last month on the proposed public safety tax, as reported by a local news Web site.
It was reported that the police department would have to pay the $16,461 to cover the cost of the special election, which saw voters decline a sales tax that would have supported the police and fire departments.
But Karen Scott, the city’s chief financial officer, told the Finance Committee Tuesday that was not correct and that the cost had been covered by the elected officials’ fund, also called the mayor’s fund. That fund was enough in the black at the end of November to cover the cost of the election and end up with just a $2,000 deficit, which will be made up in December, Mayor Rick Holland explained.
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Razorbacks
