According to:
The Daily Sentinel
By MIKE WIGGINS
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
The Grand Junction City Council unanimously approved a $142 million budget for 2008 on Wednesday night. Capital spending will drop sharply and operating expenditures will increase.
$3 million to redesign Colorado Avenue between Second and Seventh streets(Just to design? Oh My God- not another roundabout! editor)
Operational spending will bump up 11 percent from $94 million this year to $106 million next year. Much of that will come from the addition of 38 full-time employees, giving the city a total of 675 employees. Half of the new employees will be allocated to the police and fire departments.
City Manager Laurie Kadrich told council members the city’s finances are on solid footing, thanks to a booming economy. The Grand Junction Metropolitan Statistical Area has the 14th-fastest growing economy in the country over the past 10 years. It is also enjoying the fastest job growth and fastest-growing wage and income in Colorado, she said.
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Now let us look at what she said a few weeks ago:(Editorial insert)
By Emily Anderson
Free Press Staff Writer
October 31, 2007
Thirty-eight new full-time jobs are proposed for next year’s budget. The city also wants to look at bringing more workers into the “sustainable wage” category, said City Manager Laurie Kadrich.
(Where is this leading??? ed.)
The Colorado Center on Law and Policy (cclponline.org), which focuses on eliminating poverty in the state, defines sustainable wages as the amount of money a person has to make to get by in a particular community, rather than going by the broader federal poverty line. A 19-39 year old single parent of an infant, for example, would have to make $24,744 a year to live self-sufficient in Grand Junction by 2004 standards, according to the CCLP Web site.
Currently, 43 percent of city employees did not make a sustainable wage in 2004, according to Kadrich.
“A lot of the 43 percent are jobs critical to our operation,” like technology positions, Kadrich said.
The City Council would have to approve a rule about how many employees have to make sustainable wages, Kadrich said.
