(Seguin) — The city of Seguin is investing heavily in its employees in a newly proposed budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year. The proposed budget was presented during Tuesday’s meeting of the Seguin City Council.
The proposed general fund budget calls for expenditures of $49.6 million. That’s approximately $6.6 million more than the budget adopted last year. Salaries and employee costs typically make up the bulk of the general fund, and that’s also true for next year’s budget.
City Manager Steve Parker says they recently conducted a study that looked at salaries across the various city departments. He says they are trying to address some positions that might be below where they should be for this market. Parker says hiring the best and brightest is what they try to do, and it’s important that the city invests in these employees.
“We are very lean here at the city. We focus on hiring good employees. We are willing to and this council has been very generous of making sure that we are able to compensate our good employees. That helps us stay very lean because we don’t hire crappy employees to be very frank. We hire very good ones, and we get a lot done with those good ones,” said Parker.
Parker says in looking at the salaries that didn’t just focus on new hires, they looked at the salary level of all employees across the board, and tried to make sure they adopted a budget that was responsible to both the employees and the taxpayers.
“We’ve recently completed a compensation study that looked at our overall levels. I think we are fairly competitive. I think one of the things that stood out from that study though was over the years, when the city of Seguin wasn’t giving raises, we end up developing a lot of compression issues with our pay plan where people who have been there 15-20 years maybe didn’t get raises a lot of those years and now, we have brought in new employees that are doing similar jobs and have only been there two or three years and are almost making or in some cases making more than those employees that have been there for years so we are addressing some of those compression issues with this budget,” said Parker.
City staff proposed a tax rate of 50.25 cents per $100 of property valuation, which was a two-cent decrease under the current rate of 52.25 cents. The city council, in looking at some of the expenditures facing the city next year, opted to propose a tax rate of 51.25 cents. That would be a penny less than last year, but it would give the city an additional $386,000 for next year’s budget.
The city of Seguin also operates water, wastewater, storm water and electric utilities. Those items are fund by rate payers in the city, and property taxes are not used to pay for those expenditures. The proposed utility fund budget for next year is $66 million, which is about $6 million more than the budget adopted last year.
The budget and tax rate were formally presented to the city council on Tuesday night, but no action was taken. Additional discussions and public hearings on the budget and tax rate will be held before any formal adoption. The city’s new fiscal year begins on October 1.