Cape Girardeau City Council: John Voss

Name: John Voss

Year of birth: 1963

Place of birth: Cape Girardeau

Spouse, children's names: Janice, wife; Justin, Jordan and Jackson, children

Occupation: Engineer

Employer: Procter & Gamble Paper Products Co.

Businesses owned, all or part: None

Previous offices held or sought: Cape Girardeau City Council

1. What are the most important improvements in city services needed in Ward 1? The needs of Ward 1 are similar to those of the entire community. We need to maintain and improve our infrastructure for our neighborhoods and businesses to remain vibrant and prosper. Maintaining or building new streets, providing a plentiful, safe water supply and a sanitary sewer system may not sound exciting but are necessary foundations for a community to survive and grow. We must provide the resources for our public safety employees to ensure our citizens are safe and secure in their homes and community. City employees need to receive the training and leadership to continue to bring innovation and enhancements to our quality of life in a financially responsible manner.

2. Cape Girardeau is considering whether to begin a rental inspection program. Are inspections needed? Explain. I believe a rental inspection program can have a positive effect on the entire rental market in Cape Girardeau. A majority of landlords today are doing a good job of ensuring that their rental properties are maintained and comply with current city codes. Those properties that do not comply with current safety codes represent a risk for tenants and potentially the public at large. If a rental inspection program were developed, it should provide incentives for responsible property owners to require little oversight from the city.

3. City employees have not received a raise for two years. In the same period, the city's unrestricted reserves have dwindled to almost nothing. If the next city budget can either give raises or rebuild the reserve fund, which will you choose and why? I am committed to finding a way to accomplish both objectives.

We must begin to build our reserve funds back up to ideally over $1 million for the general fund. At the end of the 2009 fiscal year we had just over $500,000 in the general fund unreserved fund, or about 2 percent of our general fund budget for 2009-2010. It is important that we have some savings to fall back on, especially as some cushion for when sales tax revenue declines or is flat.

While we have not been able to provide raises to our employees these past two years, we have been able to make one-time payments of $600 to every full-time employee each of the past two years, which represented on average about 1.6 percent of pay each year to help offset inflation. Additionally, even though other communities in the region reduced work hours or resorted to layoffs, Cape has not had to take these types of actions and has maintained our city services.