Council holds first vote for next fiscal year budget
JACKSON, Tenn. — The Jackson City Council held their first vote for the next fiscal year’s budget Tuesday morning.
If you were at Tuesday’s meeting or watched online, you were able to witness the confusion as many motions and amendments were brought forward.
At one point, Councilman J.P. Stovall proposed a property tax increase of 17 cents, and raising the city sticker by $10. This would have more than covered the budget deficit, while also providing more money for roads.
The motion failed with only Stovall and McKelvey voting in favor. We asked Mayor Conger what the struggles are regarding revenues matching expenses.
“If you look at the actual statistical number, a residential neighborhood is a net loss for our city when it comes to services and infrastructure,” Mayor Conger said. “Those things cost money. So as we see growth, the investments have to happen to accommodate that growth as we see the residual income receivables.”
If you remember Friday afternoon, Mayor Conger proposed balancing the budget by removing many capital funds for varying departments. The council made a motion to disregard the Mayor’s proposal.
We asked Mayor Conger exactly what was decided.
“The council amended what was proposed today to include the capital requests from the departments, which total in $5.3 million,” Conger explained. “Then take the remainder of that, which is not funded from fund balance, which is about $3.6-$3.7 million.”
The current fund balance sits around $18 million, which puts them dangerously close to the limit where the state wants them to be.
However, there is still around $2.6 that the city is expecting to be added to their fund balance in the future. Mayor Conger gave us his thoughts on this decision.
“Today I like the council’s commitment. Several of them voiced their commitment to want to go through this line by line with departments. So we’re going to set that up and have those discussions. I think several of them mentioned that I asked our departments to cut,” said Conger.
The Council plans on starting those meetings with departments heads in the very near future.
The Council will still need to hold another meeting to vote on the budget a second time.
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