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Hartwell City Hall
Hartwell City Council’s 2023 budget includes a 7 percent “cost of living” raise for all city employees and a “payment plan” for the new sewer.
The total fiscal year 2023 budget for the city of Hartwell is $6.1 million – an $11,000 increase from 2022’s budget, which was $6,089,685. The largest portion of the new budget is going towards city employees who will be given a 7 percent raise to help them adjust with the price increase for goods, according to city manager Jon Herschell.
“The biggest thing is the employees. A lot of our rank and file employees have been hit really badly with inflation and we have tried our best to do some new things creatively throughout the year while staying within budget to raise some of the lower paid employees to try and get them some relief,” Herschell said. “The biggest thing going forward is a 7 percent cost of living raise for our employees across the board. That is the biggest thing in our budget.”
According to the inflation tracking website tradingeconomics.com, the U.S. inflation rate has averaged 7 percent since December 2021.
“It hurts everybody. It doesn’t just hurt the guy that is working the street department or the police officer. It hurts everybody, and so we are all in this together,” Herschell said. “It’s a little tricky but I think we are on the right track.
“Normally we give our employees a 3 percent or 3.5 percent cost of living raise each year, [but] in order to maintain our employees’ standard of living [we] have to give them a 7 percent raise, so that’s what we are doing.”
Council also rolled back the city’s millage rate from 9.91 to 9.26. According to Herschell, the decreased millage rate will help “fight inflation” and generate much-needed revenue for Hartwell in 2023.
“We are pretty proud that we were able to roll the millage rate back,” Herschell said. “That is also going to fight inflation because a lot of people’s appraisals came back extremely high due to inflation, so to offset that cost we have rolled back our millage rate. That’s a neutral so it’s not a tax increase.”
Council also budgeted for $320,000 for improvements to the sewage treatment plant that are currently underway, with an expected $80,000 more coming from Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST).
“I call it our mortgage payment. We had to finance this project, so we got a lot of grants for it, but we had to get a $12 million loan from the Georgia Environmental Finance Company. That payment will come due not this year, but the year after next, and we were still able to budget for it,” Herschell said. “It’s a big mortgage payment. [The sewer] is a multimillion-dollar project that is going on right now and our utility customers are not going to see any rate increase, and they are going to get a much nicer, newer plant that will last 40, hopefully 40-50, years.”