By COLE REIF
Great Bend Post
The City of Great Bend, along with other municipalities, are entering their budget season. During their work session last week, the Great Bend City Council heard from outside agencies requesting increases in their 2025 budget.
City administration is also figuring out possible raises for employees, with a proposed 2% raise and 2% merit increase. City Administrator Brandon Anderson said an annual evaluation in the past determined if employees received all of the merit raise or none.
"When I'm doing an evaluation, I almost don't like it being tied to merit because I think it puts too much pressure on the situation," said Anderson. "I'm not a big fan of annual evaluations. I'm a big fan of if there's something wrong, let's fix it. In the annual evaluation, maybe that's where we summarize the improvements we made over the year. If you only do annual evaluations, six months in you may note something, we really don't handle it. We're not getting better."
Great Bend voted to keep their Revenue Neutral Rate of 45.202 mills in the 2024 budget, a drop from the year prior at 51.692 mills. The city will wait to see what estimated valuations are as they try to implement pay raises.
"We're trying to pay employees as much as we can but we're also trying to be accountable of the taxpayers," said Anderson. "All of our expenses have gone up too. Those payroll expenses, in a perfect worlds, are what we need to see increase by at least the cost of living. We're trying to keep up."
The city is also considering implementing vacation buyback options for employees.