Finance committee seeks clarification of charge

Members of a City Council-appointed finance committee talked Friday about clarifying what they are supposed to study before they can go further.

To start, Tom Franz, committee chairman, asked for the specific charge from the council. According to city documents, the charge that was issued said the group is to “Explore long term revenue sources and to return the findings in 60 days to the City Council.”

Leslie Haase, the city’s finance director, said that as she understood it, the charge was to look for a revenue source.

“That’s kind of a broad thing,” Franz said.

Council member Taylor Brown, the council liaison to the committee, said, “We are under some pressure right now, but the council by and large — I don’t speak for every individual — is wanting to find a way to fund raises for police and fire.” He said the city manager did a pay study to look at pay ranges in Springfield and four cities in Northwest Arkansas that could be used as a guide to establish higher pay scales for police and firefighters.

Brown said those pay numbers were used to create a weighted average of pay ranges.

Committee members asked how the averages were weighted and whether it was a simple average rather than a weighted one. Brown said he would have to obtain clarification from the city manager.

Brown also said that the council wanted to fund an initial pay plan increase at 55 percent of that average.

The council, at a work session about two weeks ago, had agreed to try to fund an initial increase of 50 percent of the average from those pay scales.

The city manager, Sam Anselm, this week told the council he had been adjusting the pay ranges in the study and thought that the initial step to close the pay gap between Joplin and the other cities might be able to stretch to 55 percent.

An initial cost to raise pay that much could be about $320,000. Brown said the city manager is to find that source, but the finance committee is to identify a sustainable way to make payroll if wages were eventually bumped up to a pay scale at 80 percent of the average of the other cities.

Finance committee members wanted to know how much revenue they were being asked to identify. That question would need further clarification, they said, before they could make a determination.

The city finance director identified tax sources the committee could consider.

Joplin does not have a property tax that goes to the general fund like many other cities, Haase said. The city has a minimal property tax that is used for some costs for health, parks and solid waste disposal.

Other options

• Use tax, which Joplin voters rejected last month but could be proposed again later.

• An increase in the city’s general sales tax, which currently amounts to 1.5 cents for the city’s general fund and public safety sales tax, but could be raised another half cent under state law.

• A fire protection sales tax of up to a quarter of a cent advocated by council member Diane Reid Adams.

The committee will meet again later this month after the confusion over what they are being asked to study is clarified.

Cost of raise

City Manager Sam Anselm previously said the cost of raising city pay to the 80 percent level of a five-city average would be more than $900,000 for police and fire employees, alone. City wages and benefits for all city employees now take 76 percent of the city’s general fund revenue at a cost of more than $21 million.

This content was originally published here.

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