City officials cover many topics at Saturday’s Eggs & Issues Forum
By Joey Berlin
Originally published 02:04 p.m., April 14, 2008
Updated 02:04 p.m., April 14, 2008
Emporia City Commissioners and City Manager Matt Zimmerman answered questions on city job classification, cooperative efforts with the county and the Buxton retail development study during the latest Eggs & Issues forum Saturday morning at the Lee Beran Recreation Center.
All five commissioners made opening remarks at the start of the forum, discussing the budgeting process, the city’s capital improvement plan and the potential impact of the Tyson layoffs. Commissioner Jeff Longbine said the city was in a period of change, and the opportunity was there to “transform the community into something that we all want and can all be proud of.”
“The thing that we really need is, we need community involvement and we need community communications,” he said. “... We’re gonna need a lot of input from the community on which directions you would like us to go in the budget this year, when it will be a tough budgeting session, I’m sure.”
Commissioner Bob Agler said the city needed to be prepared to adjust as time moves along, which is why one of the city’s budget goals is to create a three- to five-year projection for the budget. He said he was confident in the commission’s ability to make positive things happen.
“Challenges? Yeah,” he said. “Opportunities? Yes. Problems? Only if we allow them to sit there.”
Zimmerman faced a question early in the forum about his plan for city job reorganization and the city’s wage pool. He told the audience that the city was understaffed, which is why he wasn’t necessarily looking to eliminate full-time positions. Zimmerman’s proposal calls for seven new full-time jobs and the elimination of two part-time jobs.
“We used to have 19 public works employees — now we have nine, and they’re trying to do the same amount of work,” he said. “So we’ve been through those hard decisions in the last five years that we tried to eliminate a lot of those costs through attrition of personnel. And I kind of think we’ve reached the bottom.”
Mayor Julie Johnson added that the city has “been operating without key people for several years.” She said she thought that having no city planner, which Zimmerman’s plan would add back onto the city payroll, was a detriment to the community.
Commissioners were asked about what they thought the positives and negatives were of the Buxton study, which used consumer purchasing data to match Emporia with specific retailers to recruit. Agler said one thing that stood out about the Buxton study is that it featured fact-based data, rather than being based on someone’s opinion.
Commissioner Kevin Nelson said the Buxton study looked at a different way of compiling data than other previous retail development studies the city has had. He indicated the study may not direct the city toward retailers some citizens want, such as Target.
“That’s been the big thing that’s kind of been thrown around town,” he said. “That was one that everybody was saying, ‘Hey, hopefully that’ll draw a Target.’ Well, I don’t know if it will. Their study may not show that it can.”
The study’s resulting top-20 list of retailers for the city to target hasn’t been explicitly released to the public. Another question asked at what point the retailers’ names would be released and what the reasoning was for withholding them. Longbine, also the chairman of the Regional Development Association of East Central Kansas, said the names of the city’s top retail matches had been supplied to developers. He said the RDA was trying to avoid having 50 different people marketing the community in 50 different ways.
“We’re not trying to withhold the information from anybody,” Longbine said. “What we’re trying to do is make sure that the information is interpreted correctly, and the community is marketed correctly. I’m sure that Kent (Heermann, RDA president) would be happy to sit down with anybody that has a vested interest — whether they’re a community member, or a developer, or a shop owner, or anyone that has interest in it — (he) would be happy to sit down and go over the results of the study, whatever you want him to look at.”
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