Special Meeting December 18th-- Levy Setting

We took care of some of our last logistics of the year at the special meeting yesterday afternoon at 4:00pm at City Hall.  It was a short meeting and since it was a special meeting we couldn't discuss anything other than what was on the advertised agenda.

We had Councilors Kennedy, Benson, and Moody present in addition to myself.

Our advertised agenda just had a few things on it:

Consent Agenda with the usual three items (approve the meeting agenda, approve previous meeting agenda, and payment of bills). We do this every meeting so that we can stay up to date. This was approved after perusal of the bills and prior meeting's information.

The final approval of the Levy for 2016 was the next thing. There was a resolution presented that summarized the result of the budgetary work that the Council and staff performed this year. It reflected a total 2016 levy of $871,865.01, up from the 2015 levy amount of $828,384.03 by 5.79%. This change was due to increased expenses the City is subject to through our obligations to our employees and overall operations expenses. The levy numbers passed unanimously.

The final piece of information on our agenda was the setting of wage increases for our non-union employees in the City. Currently all of the department managers are non-union employees and thus the Union agreements that we make as the City do not impact them. Considering our dependence on these employees and attempting to continue a sense of equity between all employees, the Council made a motion to increase the non-union employees' wages at the same level as Union members for the 2016 year. This motion passed unanimously.

At that point we had no further items on the special meeting agenda, so we summarized our next meeting, which will be December 30th at NOON simply to authorize the paying of bills. We can't do much at that meeting because it falls so close to the end of the calendar year, which is why we had to call this special meeting on the 18th to get some of the work done in time.

We then adjourned the meeting and went on to our Friday evening events!

Thank you for a good year and as always let me know if you have any questions/concerns!