The Guillory administration's budget-- gets the proposed budget approval by the city and parish councils, but with a few changes.
One of the biggest changes in regard to proposed pay raises.
The Guillory administration's proposed budget included more than 220-thousand-dollars in pay raises.
Including the fire chief, chief of police, CAO, traffic roads and bridges director, parks and rec director, among others.
As for the legislative side, list raises for clerk of council, senior administrative assistant, assistant city-parish clerk, and administrative assistant totaling to 48 thousand dollars.
However, District 2 Parish Councilman Kevin Naquin believes the amount allocated towards raises was too significant and needed to be justified.
"At this time it's probably best over all with the economy and recession. And I think we should use our tax payer dollars a little be more wiser."
So Naquin proposed an amendment-- removing the pay raises from the budget, a move first met with an objection by city councilman Andy Naquin.
"At this point. I think it's best to take a deep breath and take a step back. And for that reason I'm going to pull my objection to the amendment,” District 2 City Councilman Andy Naquin said during the meeting.
In the end, the amendment to remove all pay raises passed.
Some raises from the executive branch were over 30,000 dollars. We asked Mayor-President Josh Guillory if he thought it was necessary to have raises as much as some people’s salaries:
“Yeah one hundred percent we have a duty to make sure we're paying people according to their efforts...especially when it comes to traffic roads and bridges. Drainage our finance director. World class award winning finance department. We’re asking some of these guys to work 60 to 70 hours, they don’t get paid over time. We have consolidated some of our departments that you’ve seen over the last fical year. And when you do that you’re asking directors and leaders to do more,” Guillory said.
However, Naquin says raises can be revisited in the future.
"I think it's always a good time to regroup and figure out down the road how do we accomplish it where we're all together so theirs always an opportunity to come back,” Naquin said.
The Mayor-President can veto the amendment bringing it back to the table or he could bring it back for mid-year fiscal adjustments.
“The second option is mid-year adjustments. It wouldn’t be this fiscal year, if we were going to do a fiscal year adjustment. We may ask the council to pass it before the next fiscal year which goes into effect November 1, but it wouldn’t go into affect until after that time period,” Guillory said.
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