The Selma City Council moved money around the budget to hire five police officers and eight Public Works laborers, but they paid for the laborers with funds set aside to pay for a referendum that Mayor James Perkins Jr. hopes will bring in more tax money.
The council balanced the current budget by removing funding for unfilled positions. The council has since “restored” positions as requested by moving money from other line items in the budget to cover salaries. The goal has been to ensure each department’s “bottom line” remains unchanged.
On March 26 the mayor’s office asked the council to approve moving money around in the Police Department budget to cover salaries for five police officers. The council approved the request.
The mayor’s office next asked the council to restore the positions of eight laborers who will cut grass and do other “beautification” projects. Five laborers currently do beautification work in the Public Works Department. Hiring enough laborers will allow the city to keep the grass cut without councilpersons having to hire outside contractors to do beautification work in their wards.
But unlike the Police Department request, there was no proposal to move money from other line items in the Public Works Department to cover almost $118,000 in salaries through the end of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
After some discussion, the council voted to cover the laborers’ salaries using $100,000 set aside in the budget to pay for a referendum to increase property taxes. Perkins said the city’s budget “is unsustainable” without additional revenue, and he has said allowing citizens to vote on a property tax increase is the best way to bring more money into the city.
No date for the referendum has been set, but Perkins said when the budget was being written that he hoped to hold the referendum this summer.
Perkins called taking money from the referendum “a grave mistake.”
“You’re about to put the nail in the coffin of the city if you follow this logic,” Perkins told the council as they prepared for the vote. All council members except Michael Johnson voted to move the funds. In a separate vote, all council members voted to hire the eight laborers.
President Pro Tem Clay Carmichael, who presented the idea of taking the money from the referendum line item, said the council could come up with the $100,000 if “everybody wants to move forward” on the referendum.
Perkins noted that including the $100,000 for the referendum in the budget was part of the negotiations for the current budget. Those negotiations became so heated that Perkins sued the City Council to prevent a version of the budget they approved from taking effect. A budget the administration and the council could live with was eventually passed, and the lawsuit was dropped.
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