Cave City Council conducts first reading of 2024-25 budget

By MICHAEL CRIMMINS
Glasgow News 1

It was hot and humid despite the low, soon-to-be-setting sun when five Cave City City Council members — Peggy Pippin, Brandon Wright, Beverly Ford, Clifton Parsley and Denny Doyle — gathered at city hall for a special-called meeting on the current and future fiscal budgets of Cave City.

The meeting was called to order at 5 p.m. with the customary Pledge of Allegiance and invocation. There was only two business items on the special-called agenda; ordinance “6A” amended the 2023-24 Cave City budget and ordinance “6B” adopted the next fiscal year’s budget. Like most other ordinances these require two readings before they are officially adopted. That second reading is scheduled for Thursday, June 27, at 6 p.m.

“This ordinance trues up the budget to the appropriations authorized by the budget and approved by council vote throughout the year,” Cave City Attorney Bobby Richardson said. “That’s all this does.”

That amendment’s first reading passed unanimously.

The second ordinance concerned the 2024-25 budget. According to this “rough draft” of the city budget the “total resources available for appropriation” stands at roughly $3.35 million in the general fund — that number includes the $987,999 carried from this year’s budget. The “Road Aid” is reported to be $91,756 in the expected resources available for appropriations. Moving to the expected expenses the proposed budget stated roughly $3.14 million worth of appropriations in the general fund and $96,071 in the road category — that number is higher than the expected road aid revenue therefore $4,315 is proposed to be transferred from the general fund.

Council member Doyle said he would like to see an increase in rental fees for the community building, which, according to the proposed budget, will bring roughly $8,500 in revenue and $5,000 in proposed expenditures.

“We’ve got budgeted for the community building $5,000 this past year, and I’m assuming this includes insurance and everything else, we spent $18,781.08 — that’s almost three times as much as the budget,” Doyle said. “I would like to see us sometime in the near future raise the fee to rent that building, if only by $25 a pop.”

Cave City Mayor Dwayne Hatcher said that was already a topic of discussion between the clerk and himself.

Other than some moments of silence in which Wright added up some numbers and compared this proposed budget with the current one, no other discussion was had.

“We actually spent $2.66 million last year and we’re budgeting this year $3.3 million,” Wright said. “So we’ve got in the budget almost a million more than what we spent last year. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have extra money in these departments in case unexpected things come up. Just because this budget is $3.3 million doesn’t mean we’re going to spend it.”

The first reading past unanimously and the meeting adjourned quickly afterwards.