Taxes stay the same under Clinton’s new budget

Taxes stay the same under Clinton’s new budget

By Randy Bell

The City of Clinton will head into the new fiscal year with a $23.3 million dollar budget which includes pay raises for employees but no tax increase. The budget is $671,489 bigger than the current spending plan and takes effect October 1.

“This was a hard budget, because we had to come up with so much money to fund public safety,” says Mayor Phil Fisher. “We had $600,000 in new dollars that we could work with, but we needed another $706,000 to get to where we felt like we needed to be. And we had to really work hard to come up with that. It wasn’t the easiest thing we’ve ever done.”

Fisher says the City scraped up the extra money to fund pay raises for police officers and firefighters from several sources, including:

• Freezing three vacant positions in both the police and fire departments.
• Using the two per cent hotel tax to fund the Clinton Visitor Center.
• Covering one-time expense projects with money from the City’s new bond issue. Those projects include a new roof at the Wood Center, roof repairs to Fire Station #3, door repairs at the Quisenberry Library and exterior repairs to the City Annex on Highway 80.

Police officers and firefighters will receive the largest raises, while most other City employees will get pay hikes of three per cent. There’s also money in the budget to give the mayor a $20,000 salary increase and the aldermen an extra $5,000 effective, with the new term in July 2025.

“This board doesn’t get [the raise],” Fisher points out. “You have to run for it.” He says the mayor’s salary hasn’t been raised since the mid-1990s.

The budget includes $1.3 million for street paving next fiscal year, the same as this year.

The City’s tax levy will remain at 41.49 mills, and the Clinton Public School District’s millage rate will also be unchanged.

CPSD’s annual budget presented with no tax increases
Special to The Clinton Courier

Clinton High School

The Clinton Public School District’s (CPSD) annual budget will enter its tenth year without seeking any tax or millage increase.

CPSD superintendent Dr. Andy Schoggin and district financial director Libby Callegan presented the district’s annual budget, which had been previously approved in July by the CPSD Board of Trustees.

Schoggin said the district’s aim is to be as fiscally responsible with the resources allocated to the district while living up to the high expectations of parents and the community.

“Going back for ten years, you can see that there’s been no request for an increase, and that will be the same [this year],” he added.

Schoggin said the school district benefits from a strong local tax contribution, and with that comes an expectation to provide a high quality educational experience for all students residing in the Clinton Public School District.

“The interdependence of both [the district and the City] works together to make sure we’re doing the best we can for what the citizens of this city expect and deserve,” Schoggin said.

Clinton firefighters disappointed in pay raise

By Randy Bell

Tammie Stephens

While neither department got as much money as requested, Clinton’s police officers will see a significantly higher bump in their pay in the fiscal year beginning in October compared to the City’s firefighters.

“We’re in pretty good shape,” says Police Chief Ford Hayman. “They’re going to get the police department where we need to be.”

Hayman had asked for a $10,000 across-the-board raise for his officers, to try to keep them from leaving for higher-paying jobs elsewhere. The budget boosts the Clinton Police Department’s (CPD) starting salary from $42,000 to $50,000 and adds $3,000 after one year on the job, with an additional $3,000 after three years.

“I’m excited that we’re going to be able to publish some really good [pay] numbers and be competitive and attractive here in the metro area,” Hayman says.

There’s not the same level of optimism at the Clinton Fire Department (CFD), where the starting salaries will increase from $35,000 to $37,500, with increments pushing the pay to $48,000 after about eighteen months.

Fire Chief Jeff Blackledge had also requested a $10,000 across-the-board raise for his firefighters.

“From the looks of the budget, there’s some disparity between the police department and the fire department,” Blackledge says. “And that’s what my guys are harping on, a little bit, that we ought to be treated the same – and I can’t fault them for that.”

Blackledge says he isn’t sure if the pay hikes the Board of Aldermen approved will be enough to keep the CFD from suffering a significant loss in manpower.

“Only time will tell,” he says. “If we’re not [able to avoid departures], we’ll have to take whatever measures we can and [do] what we need to do to keep the fire department running.”

Blackledge has indicated previously that if he doesn’t have a sufficient number of firefighters, one of Clinton’s four fire stations might have to be closed.

“There is a possibility that it will come to that,” he says, “and I [would] hate to do that.”

Captain Kentress Hampton has spent twenty-three years with Clinton Fire, and he says he takes the pay discrepancy personally.

“It’s baffling, the difference in the pay,” Hampton says. “I think that it is kind of a slap in the face to not think about your fire department. I’m not going to discredit the police department, because they do a lot of stuff that we don’t do. But we also do a lot of stuff that the police department doesn’t do. It seems like the fire department was just an afterthought.”

He’s worried that assurances from City leaders that they’ll try to do more for the Fire Department next year could wind up as empty promises.

“We’ve been told that before,” Hampton says. “Next years never come.”

Ward 4 Alderman Chip Wilbanks explains the pay difference between the police and fire departments this way: “When you talk about these two groups, you have both [which are] extraordinarily deserving, and we wish we could pay them both everything that the two chiefs asked for. But when you have a limited amount, you’ve got to make some awfully hard decisions. And you need to look at where we’re physically, geographically located.”

Wilbanks says Clinton’s proximity to Jackson makes the effort to maintain a low crime rate a priority.

One way for the City to have fully funded larger raises for both departments would have been to raise property taxes. But there was no sentiment on the Board to do that.

Ward 1 Alderwoman Karen Godfrey says a tax hike might seem like an easy solution, but, “When you add that on top of groceries [costing] more, just the cost of living, everything being more, you’re piling on folks. So, we thought it was a bad idea.”

Even though taxes will stay the same under the new budget, Clintonians could wind up paying more for their homeowner’s insurance if the fire department is forced to close one of its stations because of a lack of manpower, impacting the City’s fire rating.