Anamosa
After saying a month previously at their first budget work session that they wanted to see a more “realistic budget” when numbers were finalized, city department heads presented a tweaked budget with that aim at their March 6 work session for the council to discuss.
In the parks and recreation department, director Shelly Carr said the department is looking at taking a long view of needs and coming up with a comprehensive plan for projects going forward, including looking at possible funding sources. One project that the department is looking at is engineering for an updated kitchen at the Lawrence Community Center. Other projects in the budget include showers at the aqua court, funds for updating the bandshell and park shelter and starting to turn donated land into a park.
Streets superintendent Shane Brown said the city was looking forward to the possibly of getting assistance from the penitentiary once again. Clarification was required on how salaries were being accounted for and whether it was in the budget twice.
Brown said the community service officer’s (CSO) salary, which is taken out of the police budget for financial reasons, was something other departments were hoping to be able to help fund.
“We still need that CSO person and he really helped, and us departments don’t want to put it all on [police chief Jeremiah Hoyt], because that guy is helping us out and we’re very willing to take him and pay him out of each department,” Brown said of discussions he’d had with other departments department. “I had 15 calls in the first week…I want to make sure we can still get that guy.”
Hoyt, currently serving in the role of interim city administrator, said the department discussed the matter and were currently looking at how to fund and reclassify the position to allow the salary to come out of multiple departments.
“I’m going to do my best to make that happen, but I just know we just have a few weeks,” he said. “We still might have to take a break for a year.”
Council members agreed that the matter was worth pursuing.
In the water and wastewater department, utilities superintendent Steve Agnitsch stated there wasn’t a lot that needed to be tweaked. The highlights included increasing the budget for equipment needs to be able to rotate out water meters that were older than a decade.
“We’re losing income because a water meter slows with age,” he said.
Other items of note included updating the plants’ technology and security cameras.
At the library, librarian Erin Rush reinstated children’s programming to the current year’s level, added some money back into adult programming and added back in the Hoopla program. Other tweaks included added costs for electric and insurance. With $5,000 more, Rush said she could cover increased costs and get programming to the levels they’ve been at since hiring new staff in February—up 46%.
On the police side, Hoyt said the numbers for salaries reflected the negotiated rate from bargaining with the union. In other items, communications contract with the county was increasing slightly, as were utilities and fuel. Decreases in the budget were largely due to the cutting of the CSO, which the city was now trying to rework. The department was reexamining their current cell phone plan.
The one department that did not present was city hall.
“With me just being down there the last week or so, I did not get a chance to look at that,” Hoyt said, though he did not anticipate many changes.
As it was a work session, no action was taken on budget items.
