The Huntsville City Council passed the mayor’s $201 million budget last night.

The Huntsville City Council approved a $201 million general operating budget Thursday night that awards a 3 percent pay raise for city employees, hires more police officers and gives increases to several discretionary appropriation recipients, including the library, visitors bureau and Von Braun Center.

I’m glad they are giving more to the public library.  Libraries are great public resources, but the Huntsville Public Library is in need of some basic things.  They don’t even have a TV cart with a VCR or DVD player.

The budget did not include a 7% cost of living adjustment (COLA) granted by the state legislature to the city retirees.  Council members Showers and Kling voted for the COLA amendment while Watson, Moon, and Russell voted against the amendment.

I must say, the mechanics of how the city retirees get their COLAs are bizarre.  The state legislature authorizes the COLA, but doesn’t fund it.  What’s to stop them from authorizing an unreasonable amount?  The city can either approve or reject the authorized amount - I don’t know if they can choose to award a lesser amount.

The problem is that the municipal retirees from across the state can pool their resources and focus pressure on the legislature in Montgomery to grant large COLAs.  Then on the local level the retirees pack council meetings and put councilmen between a rock and a hard place.  Either give out more than the city can afford or appear to be insensitive to the needs of retirees who dedicated their careers to the city.  It would be much better to let the people responsible for writing the checks to determine the dollar amounts written on them.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 6:59 am and is filed under Huntsville, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.