Lexington has $40 million surplus. It’s largely going to raises for public safety. Again.
The bulk of a more than $40.7 million surplus will go toward increasing Lexington public safety employees salaries in an effort to address retention and fill vacancies, the Lexington council voted this week.
Approximately $17 million will go to police, fire and correction unions to increase pay. An additional $9 million will be set aside to help pay for those salary bumps in the next fiscal year if the city’s revenues cannot cover the cost of those pay increases.
Police, fire and corrections have already received pay increases through new contracts that have been negotiated over the past 18 months. The four-year police contract will cost the city an additional $21 million.
Police, fire and detention center employees also received an additional $5,000 for working during the coronavius pandemic in 2021.
In late August, the council also approved a second $4,000 bonus for current police, detention center and E911 employees. The city used $5 million from a city savings account for those one-time bonuses.
Vacancies in police, E911 and the detention center have continued after those one-time bumps in pay.
“This is the absolute maximum amount that we could absorb,” said Finance Commissioner Erin Hensley during a marathon Budget, Finance and Economic Development Committee council meeting Tuesday of the increase in salaries. “We keep hearing the word recession but we don’t know what that looks like for our city.”
How much each officer, firefighter and corrections officer will receive will depend on negotiations with those unions, she said.
Other Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council members, including Councilman Fred Brown, had proposed more money for police, which has a vacancy of 80-plus officers with an additional 20 officers currently in training.
Brown tried to get the council to approve a separate memorandum of understanding with the Fraternal Order of Police Town Branch Lodge 4, the police union, that would have given 534 police officers a $10,000 raise.
That effort was tabled by the majority of the council.
Negotiations between the city and the unions should be between the administration and the unions, not the council, some council members said Tuesday.
“I’ve never seen this where a council member tried to negotiate with a duly constituted bargaining unit,” said Vice Mayor Steve Kay, who has been on council for 12 years.
Brown said he did not feel that he was negotiating a contract. It was a memorandum of understanding about pay. It was not a negotiation, he said.
David Barberie, a lawyer with the city, said the administration would come back with more details about the pay raises when those negotiations with the various unions are completed.
Still, some on council expressed reservations about using one-time money to fund salary increases. The city has used millions of dollars in one-time money to fund the current-year budget. They will have to find money in coming years to fund those expenses that are currently funded through one-time money.
“I am concerned that whatever we allocate is going to hinder the ongoing operations in the future years,” Kay said. “ We are putting a lot of money to a lot of salary. This does not tell us what we get in return.”
Kay, who is not running for re-election, said he would like to see more community policing in neighborhoods in exchange for the bump in pay.
Councilman David Kloiber, who is running against Mayor Linda Gorton in the Nov. 8 general election, said he supports other changes including tweaks in the contract with police that would allow retired police to come back.
He also said he would also support requiring those who have received training through Lexington’s police academy to remain on the job for a period of time or face having to repay the city for that training. It can take up to a year for an officer to through the academy and receive additional training.
“We have raised salaries before and it hasn’t worked,” Kloiber said of previous salary adjustments to attract and keep employees.
In addition to the salary increases for police, fire and the detention center, the council also agreed with Gorton’s recommendation to set aside money from the surplus for the fiscal year that ended July 1 for one-time supplemental pay for more than 1,300 employees who aren’t members of the unions.
In total, $3.4 million would go toward those one-time pay bumps to help employees with the rising costs of inflation, Hensley said. Only $1.2 million of that funding would come from the surplus. The remaining money will come from another fund set aside for salary adjustments the city has not yet exhausted.
The city’s total surplus was $150 million. However, the council and the administration used much of that money to fund programs in the current-year budget, which left $40 million in surplus funds to be allocated.
In addition to the salary increases, the council also voted to fund:
- $300,000 for additional winter housing for the homeless
- $4 million for affordable housing
- $2.25 million for council projects — 15 council members will get $225,000 each
- $2.3 million for capital projects such as HVAC units and to cover cost increases for certain projects including a new police roll call center
- $1 million for a Solarize Lexington program to help encourage more homeowners and low-income homeowners to use solar power on their homes
- $1 million for a yet to be announced youth sports complex
- $1 million toward infrastructure needs to build a new High Street entrance to Town Branch Park
- $300,000 toward the expansion of the visitor’s center at the University of Kentucky arboretum
- $1.2 million into the city’s rainy day fund
