At a City of Chattanooga budget work session, council members spent the morning debating how to pay proposed raises for sworn police officers and firefighters, weighing a property-tax increase tied to recent reappraisals against targeted reductions in city programs and offices.

The discussion matters because council members said the decision will affect household budgets, small businesses and public-safety staffing across the city. Council members said they want to make firefighters and police competitive with neighboring jurisdictions while avoiding an undue burden on residents.

Councilman Davis opened the substantive portion of the conversation by urging the council and administration to seek savings in the current budget before asking taxpayers to pay more. “We should start with looking at those additional savings before we consider a tax increase,” he said, adding that the council had previously discussed a 50–50 approach with the administration (half from budget savings, half from taxes). Davis also said councils should adopt annual market salary studies for police and fire and appropriate funds to bring pay to or above the average when those studies show the city is behind.

Councilwoman Hill (District 2) presented a detailed set of council ideas intended to reduce the amount the city would need to raise. Hill proposed a 15% reduction in the community development budget (which she calculated as about $1.665 million), 10% reductions in both the council office and the mayor’s office (roughly $99,666 and $771,898 respectively in her worksheet), a 5% across-the-board cut for other departments, and a provisional $500,000 reduction in city-run job-training spending (which she said is an assumption until administration staff can identify exact program dollars). Hill said those measures — combined with an existing $5 million set-aside — would yield approximately $10.9 million reserved for first-responder pay, leaving a gap she estimated at somewhere between $7 million and $12 million depending on the final ask from police and fire. Hill said she had heard first-responder requests described in the range of $18 million to $23 million.

Members disagreed on whether to accept a tax increase to close the remaining gap. Several council members urged capturing “growth” from higher property valuations (a millage-rate adjustment) to fund the raises; others urged holding the millage rate and finding additional cuts. Councilman Clark argued that keeping the tax rate steady — and cutting elsewhere — would be the fiscally conservative approach and said many of his constituents favor holding the rate. By contrast, Councilman Clark and Councilman Harvey emphasized the moral obligation to pay first responders competitively, with Harvey calling public safety and infrastructure the city’s primary functions and urging the council to capture available growth to fund pay increases rather than “be cheap.”

Administration staff acknowledged the proposals and said they would recheck the numbers. Kevin from the administration asked for clarification about the $500,000 job-training assumption; council members and staff said an across-the-board inventory of workforce-development spending (including grant versus local dollars) is still in progress. Administrative staff agreed to pull more precise figures and invited Weston (budget staff) to the table to present the police and fire requests and supporting worksheets.

No formal motions or votes were recorded during the session excerpt provided; council members framed the meeting as a work session to produce options and clarified that further action would depend on the administration’s forthcoming numbers. Several members pressed for an ongoing mechanism to avoid repeating the same shortfalls in future budgets: as one council member put it, “when everything in a budget is a priority, nothing is a priority.”

Next steps recorded in the discussion were (1) administration to produce exact figures for the police and fire requests and (2) staff to run a cross-agency inventory of workforce-development expenditures to confirm whether the $500,000 adjustment is feasible. Councilmembers said they intend to continue the work-session conversation once those figures are available.

Ending: The session continued as a work session rather than a decision meeting; council members agreed to reconvene after staff provided the requested spreadsheets and clarifications.