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City employees will likely receive a pay bump next year

Image Courtesy of the City of Homer
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City of Homer

Homer city employees will likely receive a .5-percent cost of living adjustment next year. The Homer City Council added the pay increase to the 2019 draft budget Monday.

City Manager Katie Koester introduced her draft budget in October, which did not include the additional raise on top of employees’ pay increase schedule.  

City employee committee chair Matt Clark pushed for the increase Monday, saying, “every bit counts.”  Council member Rachel Lord said the overall cost, roughly $46,000, is money well spent.

“It is good fiscal policy to maintain a wage scale that is in line with inflation over time and I do believe strongly that is an important thing not as a benefit to employees, but as an employer that we have a wage scale that will move as what a dollar buys changes,” she said.

The council approved an equivalent pay bump for workers last year. The city is on solid ground when it comes to next year’s revenue. The city projects that both property and sales tax revenue will increase. However, some of those additional funds will have to pay for a roughly 2-percent increase in operating costs.

The council also agreed to spend a roughly $250,000 surplus from 2017 on the Homer Police Department’s new building, reducing the amount of money the city is borrowing for the project.

However, council member Donna Aderhold voted against the transfer, saying it wasn’t prudent.

“We have the HERC task force coming with recommendations very shortly, and I just feel I’m not ready to put this amount of money into the police station fund,” she said.

The city council also approved hiring a new building maintenance employee for nearly $84,000. City Manager Koester said the city has added a lot of building space in recent years, but it has not hired enough maintenance personnel to keep up with maintaining that space.

“We know that we are going to have to add additional maintenance personnel when the new police station is built, and I'd really like for them both to have the capacity to participate in that building project so that there's no new systems and surprises when it gets handed over to them,” she said.

The council made additional tweaks to the budget including a new credit card station at one of the city’s RV dump stations and increasing the Homer Public Library’s funding for new books.

The council will vote to adopt the budget for the 2019 calendar year at its next regular meeting on Dec. 10.

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