The Butte Silver Bow Council of Commissioners met on August 7, 2025, to discuss the fiscal year 2026 budget, personnel requests, property sales, and community concerns. The meeting included a public comment period, a detailed budget presentation by the Finance Director, and several votes on consent agenda items.
6 2025 to order. Clerk, could we please have roll call? Ten present, two absent. Ten present, two houses. Please note the Commissioner Fisher and Commissioner Anderson are absent from tonight's agenda. Um Commissioner Walker, could you leave us in the prayer and the pledge? And to the Republic for which it stands. One nation under Godisible with liberty and justice for all. Next we'll move on to any public comment on any item on tonight's agenda. If you'd like to speak on any item on the agenda, please come forward. State your name, your address, and what number you'll be speaking on. And then I've got a um you got three minutes. Okay. Okay. I'm Pam La Kraust, 3189 South Rocker Road. Teresa Duffy, 2991 HECLA. And we are speaking on Do you want to pull the mic close to you? There you go. Thanks. Yeah. Uh communication 2025-370. And um Deputy County Attorney Aaron Reigns has a handout for all of you since our time is limited. Um we are asking for a raise. Um and how this came about, we're non-union, so um we're doing this ourselves. We um so how this came about, Matt, our boss and Ruth came to us with a spreadsheet that he had and showed us new numbers of what our salaries would be. And um I confirmed with him at that time if you know those were already approved, and he thought yes, they were. Then a couple weeks later we found out that they weren't, and then those amounts were removed before even hitting the preliminary budget. So we are speaking with you guys today to ask for so the numbers Matt showed us would have been three dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. So we thought that would be fairer than to ask for three dollars an hour. It's for Pam Laurie and myself in the office. Um if you would please take a few minutes to review the handouts. It has different information from surrounding counties. We are a lot lower than other counties in our area. It has um the breakout of three dollars an hour for the three of us. It has uh the job duties. Now the job duties is several pages long, and it actually does not cover all the so this it these job duties were for the um study that was done, the market analysis. We have had more added to our plates since then, so um it's even longer now. Uh we do feel like we work hard and would deserve a raise at this amount, and we are just asking for support um from all of you to help us bring it back into the budget. And being that we aren't union, you know, we're we're not represented or anything. We really haven't had anybody that could go to bat for us, so we thought we would take it upon ourselves and just it it can't hurt to ask. I mean, you know, it's we've been working really hard, we've had double the felonies. I mean, we went from 200 a year to 400 a year. It's all in that handout, but um our our duties have significantly significantly increased in the last couple years, and we keep you know, we're we're just trying to look out for ourselves. I mean, we know we're we show up for work, we work really hard all day, we're here from eight to five. There's always one of us in our in that chair every single day. And we love what we do. So um our office, as you guys most probably know, we deal with um homicide, attempted homicide, molestation and incest, um, mental commitments, child porn neglect, animal abuse, and the list goes on. We deal with all of it in our office. It's not just the attorneys. We also um, you know, see this stuff, read about this stuff, and we put the trial exhibits together, the trial notebooks, you know, and so we're exposed to everything.