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| City Proposes Over $1M in Budget Cuts |
UPDATED 8:42am 9/9/09 Jobs may be cut and a beach may be closed if Galesburg City Manager Dane Bragg gets all the cuts he wants in next year's city budget.
Bragg outlined the first part of his proposal to aldermen during a work session Monday night. Bragg says tax revenues are going down but expenses are going up, and that will result in a proposed $1.3 million deficit in the city's $23 million budget next year.
Bragg says of his $1.4 million in proposed cuts, almost a half-million dollars would come, in part, through the issuance of a voluntary separation program for all city employees.
"This would...come in the form of a severance package for those who are interested in separating from service," Bragg said. "Some of those may be retirement-eligible, some of them may not. We surveyed our employees and about 15% of our employees are strongly interested in some type of voluntary separation incentive."
Bragg says the proposal would include police and fire employees,as well as all exempt and AFSCME-represented employees, with a target of six percent of the city's nearly 250-person workforce being cut.
He also says he and all city department directors will take furlough days in 2010, open police and fire positions would not be filled under his proposal, and he also proposes, among other things, closing Lake Storey Beach and turning it into a marina in order to make it a revenue generator for the city.
Approval for the budget for the calendar-slash-fiscal year is months away, though, from a final vote, and Bragg says collective bargaining needs to be completed first. |
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| 09 09 09 by Newsroom |
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