LaFayette City Council discusses budget

BY KADIE TAYLOR

THE LAFAYETTE SUN

LAFAYETTE — The city of LaFayette held a Budget Meeting on Wednesday, May 27, at the new city hall to discuss the fiscal year 2026 budget and goals.

City Council Member for District B Kim Langley explained in order to raise city employee wages to par with neighboring cities, raises would need to be 8%. In order to begin raising city employee’s pay, Langley said the city would need to find more revenue. 

“Our meeting today is getting revenue from somewhere, whether that's fees, business licenses we're trying to rein back in, investments or property that we own that we don't need,” he said. “It's really going to come down to us making a decision, what we're willing to get behind and get some money. We've just got to raise [funds].”

With the desire to increase wages for city employees, Langley said there are many city employees who are productive workers and provide valuable work and effort for LaFayette, and through raising salary he hopes to retain those employees. 

“We're losing people, and when you lose people, it cost you money because you've got to retrain them,” he said. “We need to retain these employees, not only for the city's sake, but also for the overall picture of keeping good people here. Because, we've got good people.”

Ultimately, Langley said it is important for the council to work together to decide and execute what is necessary to have funds to raise employee’s salaries.

“We can sit here all day and talk about it, but we each individually have to make up our mind what we're willing to get behind as far as raising fees, getting that pulled together and then passing it,” he said. 

Council Member for District A Emily Milford suggested using the remaining months for fiscal year 2026 to begin making changes to raise funds and begin to implement raises during fiscal year 2027. 

“Can we use the mindset of playing a little bit with how we can get our revenue increased this budget cycle with the goal of implementing those raises with the next fiscal year?” she said. “That gives us four months to figure out revenue, get everything we can, and we'll try to straighten [everything out]. It's almost giving ourselves a deadline of, ‘We have until this time to get this revenue figured out,' so we can get these employees this raise that they need going into the new fiscal year, because if we don't put some kind of self-imposed deadline on ourselves, we can talk about this for another year and a half.”

Council Member for District C Toney Thomas suggested looking at the unused property and buildings the city owns that are costing the city through insurance fees and maintenance. 

“We're losing out on a lot of revenue with building the property that we don't use,” he said. “We're paying the insurance. We're keeping the old buildings up and these properties up and we're not benefiting from it. So, I think that would be one thing we need to look into, getting rid of some of these properties and buildings that we own, and we're not utilizing. It’s costing us, we have insurance on them, and they're sitting there.”

Milford said when she looks at the numbers on the budget, she believes it is likely necessary to do deep dives on making departments more profitable.

“There are some things that have positives and we're in the green on, and I realize that apparently in the past those numbers have been larger, but because the cost of things, we're even eating into the surplus on the positives,” she said. “However, there are several that are in the negative, and to me, just from things that I've run into with smaller budgets in the past, if something's in the red you can't borrow from one to take care of the other. So, if something's in the red, we've got to attack that and get it out of the red.”

The council members in attendance and Mayor Kenneth Vines discussed the mayor meeting with department heads and discussing options to raise fees and possible raises to better navigate addressing employee raises for the remainder of FY26 and upcoming FY27. 

The council agreed to meetings led by the mayor with the department heads on June 1, 2 and 3 with a Work session on June 4 at 9 a.m. at the new City Hall to discuss findings from the meetings.