The Finance Committee met on November 13, 2025, at 3:00 PM in City Council Chambers to review and discuss the proposed 2026 operating budget. Presentations were delivered by the HR Director, Planning and Community Development Director, IT Director, Fire Chief, and Interim Public Utilities Director. No public comments were received.
Human Resources (Jessica Feller):
Planning and Community Development (Sandra Periera):
Information Technology (Susie Daily):
Fire Department (Chief Tim Pyle):
Public Utilities (Perry Mickley):
Or three o'clock, and we will call to order the Dollar City Finance Committee meeting for November 13th, 2025. Roll call, please. Mr. Hoffman. Here. Mayor Rigal? Yeah. Chair Schaefer. Here. Item two's approval and motion summary. Approval of the motion summary from the finance committee meeting held on November 11th, 2025 as recorded and transcribed. Motion to approve. Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Taken care of. I'm assuming we don't have anything for public comment. Yes, sir. All right. Jump down to review and discussion of the operating budget. Jessica first. So I don't go over how to do that. Let's watch my time here. All right. Very good. Well, good afternoon. All right. We can go ahead and jump right in then. Um, real quick, uh, just to orient everyone with the way that our our department is staffed. We do have three full-time staff members, myself as director, we have human resource specialist Whitney Faust, um, and then we also have human resource administrative assistant Olivia Montgomery Gray. And uh for the past couple years, now I believe since 2023, uh, we have been afforded some seasonal hours uh to have an intern in our office during the summer months, which has been very helpful to accomplish some initiatives, um, and so we have maintained that since that time. And then we're also requesting an additional human resource specialist position for 2026. But I will get into a little bit more on that later. Uh this slide kind of overviews our general functional areas of support for the city uh of note at the bottom uh of our employee breakdown. We have 352 full-time employees, 22 permanent part-time, and for this past year we had 103 seasonal employees. So that effectively comes out to a one HR practitioner per 159 employee ratio. Oops. Make sure I didn't go too far there. Um, now I need to go back. Clicked twice. So I'm gonna review real quick uh some of the significant requests uh for our budget, uh starting with our professional services. Uh as noted up here on the screen, uh we are planning to do a compensation study in 2026 for our management pay plan, permanent part-time and for council positions, um, and that with wages taking effect for 2027. Our last study, comprehensive study, was done in 2021 for the management pay plan with changes taking effect in 2022. Uh we did do a table adjustment back in 2024 to adjust for inflation. Um then also as you'll remember, uh council ordinance last year uh specifies that the work will be done in in 2026 to effect changes for 2027. Overall, our goal with that work is to keep our wages competitive with the market and retainer valued employees. Uh we also plan for various promotional recruitment processes uh within police and fire of note there. The fire captain promotional process does not come out of our budget, uh, but we are still responsible for facilitating that process. Under health and safety, uh we are planning on implementing a biennial medical exam for our DOT employees. Uh this has not previously been required, uh, but as a result of some situations that have come up, plus a uh risk evaluation.