Jeanerette Board of Aldermen amend budget

Published 8:00 am Tuesday, March 12, 2019

JEANERETTE — The Jeanerette Board of Aldermen unanimously voted to amend the 2019 budget to reflect some unexpected budget increases at Monday’s regular meeting. 

Fiscal administrator for Jeanerette David Greer said the budget amendment was to accurately reflect Jeanerette’s current fiscal position. 

“We’re having to watch, we should have spent two thirds of our budget at this point,” Greer said at the meeting. “There are a few categories in our General Fund where we are spending greater than two thirds.”

Greer said the primary reason for the increase was due to insurance costs. Primarily the reasons are the insurance costs, which have been allocated across every department instead of just one or two departments, Greer said. 

“We’re amending our budget to reflect the increase,” Greer said. “The primary reason is insurance costs, every department is seeing some significant insurance increases.”

Greer also said the budget would reflect a decrease a dip in sales taxes for the town. After a recent finance committee meeting, Greer said sales taxes were coming back down after seeing extremely high revenue in previous months. 

“We did talk about sales taxes coming back down to that level to what it was before these prior months of increases,” he said. “We saw a $26,000 decrease from January to February in sales taxes. We’ve got to budget accordingly going forward.”

In other business, Greer said the town was beginning to pursue adding polyphosphates into Jeanerette water, which would enhance the quality of municipal water. 

After a recent cleaning of the Jeanerette water tower, Greer said it was still “up in the air” if chlorine or chloramine should be used when cleaning the water tower. Alderman Clarence Clark asked Greer if the recent cleaning of the bottom of the water tower could have caused recent discoloration that some local residents have been complaining about lately. 

“It could have, I can’t say that 100 percent but it certainly could have,” Greer responded. “We’re hoping this gives us a better quality product.”