City manager flags personnel-driven increases in governance budget; council asks for staffing, overtime and online-payment analysis

City Manager Deb Lohrey outlined the governance portion of the proposed municipal budget at a Bangor City Council budget workshop, saying revenues in that section rise by about $20,000 while expenses are up nearly $200,000 primarily because of wages, health-insurance cost increases and an additional election next year.

The governance section covers council operations, the records department (formerly the city clerk), elections, the front counter that handles registrations and property taxes, assessing and legal services. Lohrey said a single new program request proposes adding a front-counter position to reduce customer wait times and handle mail and phone inquiries; councilors asked for an analysis of that position’s costs and whether hiring permanent staff would be cheaper than continued overtime and temporary help.

The new-program request follows software upgrades that Lohrey said make an online-payment option feasible for motor-vehicle and other transactions. “We have 7,800 people doing their registrations online, and we have 24,000 walking into the building,” Lohrey said, noting that rental-car agreements at Bangor International Airport inflate in-person counts. Councilors wanted estimates of how much online payments would reduce in-person volume and asked for multi-year mail and call-volume trends.

Councilors raised workplace capacity and election staffing concerns. Councilor Leonard described sustained overtime in the clerk’s office and said volunteers who previously helped are no longer available, increasing workload pressure. He asked the manager to provide overtime and temp-hours data and a comparison showing the budget implications of hiring permanent FTEs versus paying overtime. Councilors also requested an overview of expected staffing needs for upcoming off-year and gubernatorial elections to use as a benchmark for future staffing decisions.

Lohrey said nonunion staff in the governance group are receiving cost-of-living adjustments and merit increases and that health-insurance cost variation depends on benefit selections and employee turnover. She said assessing is close to finalizing valuation numbers that affect tax-rate calculations and that the council’s recent decision to move to a private paid-family-medical-leave plan reduced projected costs included in the draft budget.

Next steps: councilors asked staff to provide a consolidated presentation of all new-program requests, a tax-rate impact comparison with and without new programs, a cost analysis for the proposed front-counter hire, trends for mail and in-person transaction volumes over several years, and a breakdown of overtime and temporary staffing costs used during the last fiscal year.