CITY PAY HIKES SHORT OF REQUESTS

Cape Girardeau's proposed $54.9 million budget for fiscal 1996 includes a merit pay hike of 2.5 to 3 percent for most city employees but no across-the-board raises.

Rank-and-file police officers wanted more: They had requested a 10 percent hike. City officials have insisted there isn't sufficient money to give employees a more substantial raise.

"For the most part, most of the officers are disappointed," Patrolman Jeff Mangrum said in a telephone interview prior to Monday's City Council study session at which copies of the budget were distributed to council members.

Mangrum is president of the area's Fraternal Order of Police. Its 75 members are from a number of law enforcement agencies. About 45 of them work for the Cape Girardeau Police Department.

Mangrum said officers would have preferred an across-the-board pay hike and wanted to see salaries increased to make them competitive with those paid police officers in other similar-size cities of the state.

City Manager J. Ronald Fischer and Mayor Al Spradling III said Monday night that the city couldn't afford what the police were asking. "Everybody is cutting back," Spradling said following the council meeting.

The council received the budget document, but took no action. A public hearing will be held June 5 on the budget, with the council slated to consider its final adoption June 19.

In the budget message, Fischer and Finance Director John Richbourg said each 1 percent pay hike, if given across the board, would add $110,000 a year to payroll costs.

Cape Girardeau plans to spend $12.5 million in payroll costs and benefits in the fiscal year which begins July 1. That amounts to 21.7 percent of the total budget.

The 1995-96 budget includes nearly 400 full-time-equivalent positions, including 89 in the police department.

Fischer said the merit pay plan has about 11 steps or classifications.

The city administration envisions paying $173,500 a year for the next 11 years to reimburse the city's General Fund for money refunded to employees through the state retirement system in October 1993.

The $54.9 million budget is nearly $11 million higher than the current fiscal year budget of $44 million, Fischer said.

Those figures don't include internal service funds, which provide and charge for service to other city programs. City officials said that including those figures would result in some costs being reported twice.

Fischer and Richbourg said the growth of the budget is largely due to a $17.4 million increase in Public Works spending and a decrease of $7.3 million in debt service as a result of the refunding of some general obligation bonds in the current fiscal year.

City officials propose spending nearly $28 million on Public Works operations this coming year.