HOLYOKE — The City Council has approved a budget for fiscal year 2023, largely leaving Mayor Joshua Garcia’s first budget untouched.
City councilors made nearly $450,000 in cuts to the budget at their final hearing Monday evening. But of those cuts, $336,240 came in one reduction to charter school sending tuition based on updated figures from the school department. Otherwise, Garcia’s $154 million spending plan was mostly left intact.
Much of the discussion Monday centered on proposed cuts to the Police Department’s $13.3 million budget. That conversation began when At-large Councilor Israel Rivera proposed cutting the number of patrol officers from 92 to 87, arguing that the department was already below that number of officers and was unlikely to hire up to 92.
Ultimately, Rivera withdrew that motion after it became clear that it would not pass. Councilors then rejected a subsequent proposal from Ward 4 Councilor Kocayne Givner to cut two patrol officer positions, with Rivera, Givner and At-large Councilor Jose Maldonado Velez the only councilors voting in favor.
At-large Councilor Tessa Murphy-Romboletti said the conversation was important, and would be bolstered by an audit of the department that the mayor’s office has said it intends to undertake.
“I think this conversation is going to be super different a year from now,” Murphy-Romboletti said.
At-large Councilor Kevin Jourdain brought forward nearly all of the cuts that were debated on Monday evening. Those included three proposals to trim line items in the Police Department budget.
One of Jourdain’s proposed cuts that failed was slashing $200,000 from the $557,691 emergency dispatcher line item due to the fact that the Police Department regularly receives a grant that covers that much of the funding for the salaries of the 12 full-time dispatchers.
“If we don’t get the grant, then they’ll have to come in to get the supplemental funding later,” Jourdain argued. “It’s just leaving slush money there, is basically what we’re doing.”
Councilors voted down that suggestion — though Rivera, Maldonado Velez and Ward 5 Councilor Linda Vacon voted with Jourdain — after City Auditor Tanya Wdowiak said that positions need to be fully funded for 12 months.
“If you were to cut the line item and there wasn’t enough money to pay all those people, we would have to lay them off,” Wdowiak said. “That’s Mass General Law: You need to appropriate all dollars for all positions.”
Jourdain also proposed cutting the department’s $427,290 holiday differential line item by $90,000, though that too failed. Councilors did, however, approve his suggestion of cutting $17,000 from the $662,706 line item for the old education plan known as the Quinn Bill, given that the line item shrinks every year as that program is phased out.
Other cuts made by the council included a $50,000 cut to the $350,000 line item for veterans benefits due to the fact that the line item has been overfunded in recent budgets.
Garcia’s balanced budget adds city jobs or restores jobs that had been eliminated, including more Department of Public Works staff to better maintain public parks, a tree climber position for the city’s tree warden, an additional inspector for the building department, an assistant chief procurement officer, two part-time associates in the law office, a senior project manager in the economic planning department, and a captain and lieutenant in the Police Department.
In the end, all councilors who were present, except for Jourdain, voted in favor of passing the budget.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.