ORANGEBURG CITY COUNCIL: Budget ups taxes and provides raises

The council also approved a new ordinance to discourage camping in urban areas.

City council voted at their Sept. 5 meeting to approve the final readings of the city’s current and upcoming budgets for the fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. The new budget will include a 3% cost-of-living raise for all city employees.

The $24 million budget will bring a $60-a-year increase in property taxes for an owner of a $100,000 home. For homeowners making a monthly mortgage payment, that would be an additional $5 per month, The T&D has reported.

Commercial property rates would increase by $90 per year on a property valued at $100,000.

The approved budget also includes raising entry-level salaries for Department of Public Safety officers from $40,000 a year to $47,000 a year and raising the hourly wage of CDL-licensed city employees from $16 to $20 an hour.

The budget will also allow the city to hire seven new firefighters, City Administrator Sidney Evering said.

The budget will also bring an increase in commercial sanitation rates, but the rates will not go into effect until Jan. 1, 2024, to give the city time to “update the public and have public input sessions, just to make sure that everyone is aware of those increases,” Evering said.

The public input for the higher commercial sanitation rates was tentatively scheduled for October, he said.

Some fines issued by the city will also increase, he said.

“Not by much, but they have not been increased for a while, at least a decade or so,” he said.

Council member Richard Stroman suggested looking into raising DPS salaries across the department to encourage retainment.

“We have good people working now, so let’s also try to keep what we have and look at their salary, too,” Stroman said.

All of the revenue generated by the tax increase will go toward city employee salaries, Evering said.

“We do have great city employees and we want to do right by them because they do right by us, but we do have a finite budget within which to work,” he said. “We certainly will work to continue to expand the tax base and increase revenue so that we can pay our employees what they deserve to be paid.”

The council approved the second reading of next year’s proposed Department of Public Utilities’ budget, which will see increased utility bills to cover inflation costs and a pay raise for the mayor and city council.

Utility bills are expected to increase around 2.2% per year on average, Joshua Nexsen, Administrative Division director for DPU, said at the meeting.

Rates have not increased since 2019, Nexsen said, during which time operating costs have gone up. Electric bills will go up by 7.7% from their 2019 rates, and gas 9.9%, he said.

After it was suggested by council member Sandra Knott, Nexsen said DPU could mail information to customers to let them know the increase is coming.

Aside from increased operational costs for the utility, the DPU budget will pay for a $5,000 raise for the mayor and council, bringing their salaries to $23,000 and $18,000, respectively.

The budget passed with council members Jerry Hannah and Bernard Haire opposing.

Hannah said he planned to donate his raise to scholarships for local students attending the community’s colleges and universities. He said he felt the raises were “totally unfair.”

“If salaries haven’t been increased, it’s our fault, not the citizens’ fault, that the salaries haven’t been increased,” Hannah said.

Hannah asked if the mayor and council raises were equivalent to the 3% raises being given to other city employees.

Nexen said that when annualized for the years since the council and mayor last received a raise in 2015, the $5,000 increase works out to a little less than 3%.

State law requires city council’s to vote on wage increases before elections, Mayor Michael Butler said.

“We don’t get a cost-of-living (increase),” Butler said. “Employees do … we just get a raise.”

Council member Liz Zimmerman Keitt also pointed out that council does not get a raise every year, only when they vote on it.

Camping in urban areas

A new ordinance to allow DPU officers to issue fines and arrests for individuals camping in urban areas passed on its first reading. The ordinance is targeted at homeless individuals who have been camping in downtown Orangeburg, Evering said.

The ordinance will allow DPU officers to first issue a written or verbal warning to anyone camping in an urban area, followed by a fine of up to $500 on a subsequent offense and an arrest if necessary, he said.

The city currently does not have a loitering ordinance, he said.

Butler said he was glad to see the ordinance, since he believes most of the individuals camping on streets downtown are choosing not to utilize the city’s Samaritan House shelter.

“We have worked hard to provide the Samaritan House for so many homeless people, which they have stellar service down there. Stellar,” Butler said. “It’s clean, it’s a place that you and I could sleep, three meals a day, a good warm bath and all that. But a lot of these people are sleeping on our streets because they don’t want to follow the rules down there. They have strong rules. They have a certain time you have to come in and you can’t go out.”

“I’m just so glad to see this put down because we are trying to build out downtown, were trying to make our downtown-friendly and some of the people that are sleeping down there have a lot of clothes and use the bathroom wherever they want and we don’t want that in our downtown area when we are consciously working to build our downtown and make it family-friendly, so I’m glad to see this on the agenda.”

In other matters

• Interim Parks and Recreation Director Shawn Taylor was appointed to fill the empty seat on the city’s Accommodations Tax Advisory Committee vacated by Shaniqua Simmons.
• Council unanimously approved a wholesale wastewater treatment service agreement between DPU and Blue Granite Water Company.

The agreement will bring 200 additional customers to the wastewater division, Superintendent of DPU’s wastewater system Ryan Etheridge said at the meeting. The area is already served by DPU for water, electricity and gas, he said.

Blue Granite will pay DPU a service charge for each customer included in the agreement for lower charges on wastewater services, Etheridge said.

DPU’s wastewater treatment service already has similar agreements with Orangeburg County and The Oaks retirement community in Orangeburg, he said.