City may decrease cost of living raise
By Bert Lehman
During preliminary budget discussions, the city of Clintonville revealed that cuts must be made to the 2023 budget in order to keep the tax increase similar to previous years.
“We are looking at that as a target going into this next year,” City Administrator Caz Muske told the Clintonville City Council at its Oct. 11 meeting. “That being said, with us giving a cost of living adjustment for our team members and the increase in commodities, gas prices, we are struggling to cut roughly $180,000 from the budget to meet that goal.”
During previous discussions Muske said decreasing the cost of living adjustment from 3% to 2% for city employees was discussed.
“The benefit to that is, it does mirror what our police union contract reflects, so there’s consistency across all departments, so that is a benefit,” Muske said. “Although, obviously it is not keeping up with inflation and actual costs throughout. But that is some of the hard discussion that we’ve had with city leadership.”
Ald. Jim Supanich, who is also the Finance Committee chairman, added that there are a lot of things the city needs to do and a lot of things the city wants to do, but the city is limited financially on how it can accomplish those things.
“We’d like to do as much as we can for the employees we have in the city, but we have some limitations as to what we can do,” Supanich said. “We do have to have other services taken care of.”
Muske solicited ideas from the council members as to how the city can cut its preliminary budget.