Portage elected officials will get their first raises in eight years next year.
Councilman Collin Czilli, D-5th, persuaded the council to amend the budget to include the 3.5% raises, the same as other nonunion employees.
“Staff members are going to quickly be making more than them currently,” Czilli said.
“There are numerous department heads who are making more than the mayor,” he said, so he urged the council to start applying cost-of-living adjustments now to keep salaries in line instead of a huge jump in the future.
Czilli also got unanimous approval to amend the salary ordinance to reduce the raises seven employees were to have received to the same 3.5% their fellow employees will receive. That’s something the council could approve before Saturday’s deadline to approve the budget.
Deciding on additional salary increases could be dealt with in the future, he said. Czilli didn’t believe it would be easy to get the four votes necessary to do so.
That comes along with council President Victoria Vasquez’s successful push to include $20,000 for a wage study.
The extra raises for the seven employees were intended to boost them closer to where their salaries should be, Mayor Austin Bonta said.
The wage study will indicate comparable salaries for similar jobs elsewhere. Clerk-Treasurer Liz Modesto said the city’s human resources director has done much of the work already to keep the study’s cost down, and unionized employees aren’t included.
Czilli asked whether the motor vehicle highway fund in the budget included receiving state gas tax revenues, with the tax suspended since April by Gov. Mike Braun.
The budget anticipates receiving either the gas tax itself or the state making up the difference by tapping its substantial surplus, as it has been doing since April, Bonta said.
Councilman Ferdinand Alvarez, D-At-large, asked Modesto his annual question: Can the city afford this budget? Modesto assured him it can.
“Thank you, mayor, for all the cuts you’ve made,” Alvarez said.
Modesto hopes it won’t have to be cut even more after the state Department of Local Government Finance gets its hands on it.
In other action, the council approved vacating an easement on Veterans Avenue just south of where the new Chick-fil-A and Dutch Brothers Coffee will be built. “This should have been vacated years ago, but it wasn’t,” Planning and Development Director Tom Cherry said. It came to the city’s attention because of the new stores.
Veterans Avenue originally was to have gone through the area where the easement was located but jogged just slightly to the south.
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Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.