The Hattiesburg City Council unanimously approved its fiscal year 2020 budget during a special meeting on Thursday, Sept. 12. However, one member expressed disappointment over what she said were salary inequities.

Before the motion was made to approve the budget, Ward 2 Councilwoman Deborah Delgado asked how she could object to only one part of the budget. City Attorney Randy Pope said he didn’t know how she would be able to do that.

After the motion was made and seconded to approve the budget, Delgado said she was concerned about the budget’s handling of employee pay, particularly in the Planning Department.

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Ward 2 Councilwoman Deborah Delgado

“In a system like ours, we should have come up with a process by now where directors, for example, have a standard or formula for determining what directors earn,” she said. “Directors, in my estimation, should earn the same thing across the board.”

Delgado also said pay should not be determined by unintelligible forms.

“Over the years, I have been concerned about the inequity in what employees have been paid,” she said. “I am not in favor of those (salary) adjustments as they exist in the Planning Department.”

Delgado became involved in the second agenda item when Ward 4 Councilwoman Mary Dryden made the motion to approve additional areas for the historic district in the downtown area. Her motion also included eliminating11 parcels from the district map.

Pope explained to Delgado that Dryden changed her motion from the original agenda item to exclude the 11 parcels. Delgado followed the agenda item in the budget motion. The City Council approved Hattiesburg’s sixth local historic district in the downtown area.

In the fiscal year 2020 budget, Mayor Toby Barker summarized the highlights of the budget in a Facebook post.

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Mayor Toby Barker

“One issue that we’ve often discussed the need for the City of Hattiesburg budget to get to structural balance,” he said. “This means that we would move toward a place where recurring revenues would pay for recurring expenses, and those two items (would) be perfectly in line with one another. It’s something that hasn’t happened since 2010, but this year we continue to make progress.”

Barker added that the $1.2 million in one-time FEMA reimbursement should not be added as a revenue item since it isn’t a recurring revenue source. And he said the city also experienced an increase in employer contributions to the state retirement system for employees.

“One question that we have been asked to see how the new 1 percent parks and recreation tax affected the overall general fund budget,” he said. “What it did was free about $100,000 out of the general fund that we had been spending on parks and recreation capital improvements; (those) will now be slated for drainage improvements.”

Barker said the 2020 budget accomplishes three things.

“First of all, it prioritizes infrastructure in addition to that $400,000 for midrange improvements,” he said. “It also increases our paving budget by $200,000, bringing our overall pay to $2.7 million, and this does not include the new internet sales tax revenue that the city will start receiving in January.”

Increased salaries in the budget include moving the minimum wage in parks and recreation and public works crew worker jobs to $11 an hour and the minimum in water and sewer complex jobs to $13 an hour.

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