MOUNT VERNON – Mayor Matt Starr said he wrote a letter urging the Mount Vernon City Council to pass a resolution backing the restoration of the Local Government Fund to at least 3.68% of the state’s General Fund.
The funding was cut to 1.66% in 2011 to cover the state’s rainy day fund. But now with that fund reaching its ceiling of $3.5 billion, the mayor said that revenue stream must return to local municipalities.
The city uses unrestricted funds to pay for unfunded mandates.
“We cut taxes at the state level, but we didn’t cut any of the unfunded mandates,” Starr said.
He wants the state to give municipalities unrestricted funds to use for infrastructure needs.
The city received nearly $108,000 in Local Government Funds directly from state allocations and $413,000 more from the county’s disbursements that went directly to Mount Vernon’s General Fund in 2007, or approximately $521,000. Last year, the city received $351,822 combined, Starr said.
Fire department prepares to hire four firefighters
The Mount Vernon Fire Department interviewed 12 candidates to replace a firefighter who plans to retire and add three more staff with federal funding.
Brian Conant will retire on May 1 after 32 years with the city. Fire Chief Chad Christopher said Conant started working for the police department but transferred to the fire department later.
After filling that vacancy, the department will hire three additional employees through FEMA’s SAFER (Securing Adequate Funding for Emergency Response) grant. Christopher anticipates filling those vacancies around the second week of April.
Police department assists criminal justice program
Officers from the Mount Vernon Police Department partnered with the Knox County Career Center and SkillsUSA for a regional competition over the weekend, Police Chief Robert Morgan told the Mount Vernon News.
It’s part of the criminal justice program. The competition involved crime scenes and car crashes. The officers went over the crime scene processing with them, Morgan said.
The school resource officer and several detectives, plus some other employees, helped with the competition.
The Mount Vernon Police Department finalized its annual order for two police cars in 2023, which should be delivered by June or July, he said.
“We’ve had really good results with our community advocate program and our dedicated traffic enforcement program,” Morgan said.
Call volumes are going back up each year to approach pre-COVID numbers.
Public legislation software training begins
Starr said the city began training its clerks on its new software for public meetings and agendas.
Todd Hill, the clerk for city council, said the city had no choice but to learn this new platform for legislation, minutes and agendas as Granicus was phasing out the previous software the city used.
Training and setting up the new software will take at least a week’s worth of intensive training and six months overall to complete, Hill said. The public shouldn’t see any change as the city plans to keep the formats as close as possible to the current software.
The process began before Hill said he came on board with the city in August 2021.
The livestreaming of meetings will continue to be done separately by the city on YouTube with links from the city website, he said.
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