GUN BARREL CITY —
The city council approved its 2009 budget Tuesday night at Brawner Hall.
Sounds pretty routine. It was actually, anything but...
Before council members voted to approve the budget, they voted it down, albeit with a minority vote.
That meant, the $3,648,383 budget the council had supposedly worked out in budget workshops, would have to be hauled back to the shop for tinkering.
Or so everyone thought.
But late in the night when it came time to decide when and where the new workshop should be held, nobody seemed all that fired up about doing anymore tinkering.
So Townsend, the mayor-pro-tem, recommended putting the item back on the agenda and re-voting.
When they did, he rescinded his earlier vote and this time voted to pass the “pork-barrel” budget.
Since the city’s bi-laws require that all city budgets submitted to the council, must have no more than one negative vote, the proposed budget suddenly had new life.
Meanwhile, pulling herself from underneath the proverbial bus where Townsend had thrown Cochran (figuratively speaking) Cochran took the microphone and doggedly cast the lone negative vote to no avail.
With Townsend’s late conversion, the budget passed 4-1.
The business of the city is never easy in Brawner Hall, but in the end, the city manager had the budget he and the panel had been working on for weeks.
The evening had started out smoothly enough with Mayor Paul Eaton saying he hadn’t heard a single negative comment about the City Manager (Gerry Boren) since he was hired a year ago, and that he felt the council could show its support for his efforts by approving the $3 million budget.
First sign of trouble came when Townsend reeled off a list of concerns, not the least of which was his contention that 58 percent of the budget was going to personnel and benefits.
Others challenged that percentage and the correct number was allegedly just 51.8 percent of the budget.
Boren explained that in the past the city had gone off in several different directions in its planning and needed to focus on one problem at a time.
He said he wanted to get the salary structures up to 70 percent of what they are in Athens.
The first step, he indicated, was hiring good employees and making sure they are happy and rewarded for good work.
Cochran was concerned that not enough money was left in the kitty for infrastructure.
That debate went on for a while, too, neither Cochran, nor Boren able to convince the other.
In other action taken at Tuesday night’s meeting of the Gun Barrel City Council, members voted to;
• fix the rate and tax levy for 2009-2009. Even though the city has no ad-valorem tax, it has set a value, and that value continues to be 0.00.
• unanimously to approve an ordinance allowing single-family site built homes to be built in manufactured housing districts (MH1).
• unanimously to use $15,000 from the hotel/motel fund to purchase fireworks for this year’s Christmas Parade.
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