Employee-friendly Seneca budgets

City of Seneca employees turned in extraordinary efforts during a pandemic and tornado year, and they are to be rewarded.  Included in the next set of budget projections for Oconee’s largest municipality are pay raises and an increase for the lowest minimum salary earners.  After having received no pay raise in the last year, Seneca’s workforce is in line for five percent pay raises in the new budgets that received tentative approval last evening by the city council.  And going forward the minimum pay rate for a worker is being raised to $15 an hour.  Scott Moulder, city administrator, projected a good financial year ahead for the city, with higher property taxes, $3.5 million dollars from the Biden American Rescue Plan, along with an eventual tornado damage reimbursement amounting to millions of dollars from “FEMA”—the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  However, the city’s ratepayers—those who use electric, water, and sewer utilities—will pay more in 2021-22, if the Moulder recommendations go through.  Moulder gave the following example of how the rate increases will impact the city’s utility customers.  For a family of four that, on the average, uses five thousand gallons of water a month, the bill will increase by $26 dollars.  That was enough for Councilman O’Kelley, the mayor pro-tem,to cast the one no vote.  Ronnie O’Kelley told reporters afterward he believes the rate increases are unfair to many of the city’s residents who are still suffering from the impact of the tumultuous 2020 year. The numbers of all of the various budgets added together amount to nearly $55.5 million as the total of what it’ll take to run another year of city government.  The council last night gave first reading to the budget.  Second and final reading is to be June 8, when members of the public may officially register comments and ask questions in a public hearing.