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employees receiving a full increase under the current plan (currently about half of the employees get a biennial increase in one year and the other half receive their increase in the next). Regarding item #3 — While the rates are not typically known until the budget process is complete, our communications with TML show that we expect another sizable rate increase beginning in January 2024. Without knowing how much this may be, and given limitations with available budget, we have budgeted to increase the City's monthly contribution another $30 for each employee to help offset the upcoming rate increases. Regarding item #4 — The City of Paris continues to struggle with hiring and retaining our police force (sworn officers). As of July 2023, the department is down 16 patrol positions. Over the past three years, we have lost 26 sworn officers while only gaining 14. This same time period began with a vacancy list in existence. The City has dramatically increased the pay via the comparable pay study as well as seniority pay, certification pay, sign on bonuses, and allowing for lateral transfers with years of service. However, we continue to struggle in this market. So as to try and stay ahead — or at the very least keep up —with local competition, we have proposed a higher COLA adjustment for the police department than that under item #1 above. In order to balance the budget, we could not do one rate across the board for all officers, and given our greatest need is new officers, we have created a new scale that adjusts the starting base for a patrolman position up by 8% ($52k to $56k) while only increasing the highest seniority level of the Assistant Chief of Police position by 2%. With this, we shifted the entire scale in between these two end posts like we did during the comparable pay study. Every sworn position will therefore receive no less than a 2% COLA, in addition to the pay increases they will see under item #2 above. In order to financially accomplish this, we have unbudgeted a majority of the remaining vacant police positions, which is similar to the practice we have done each of the past three years in order to accomplish our budgetary goals, particularly the comparable pay study. However, we will continue to seek out and hire new officers as quickly as possible in order to make up the entire vacancy list until we are fully staffed. Given historically we have been unsuccessful in filling these vacant positions, to continually budget for them while trying to maintain a balanced — and tight — budget with pay adjustments for our employees, has become challenging. Therefore, in order to still try and maintain a flat property tax levy for our tax payers in FY23/24, we are going to take advantage of this available budget room within the vacant positions to increase our pay for existing police positions (retain), which we hope will further draw more applicants (attract and hire). Should we successfully hire more officers, we will simply have to amend our budget and account for it in FY24/25 and beyond, which is the ultimate conclusion — to be at full staff. However, given the hiring process takes many months, the financial risk to the City in FY23/24 seems relatively low. This is a departure from our typical methodology of keeping several vacant positions budgeted, however, we need this funding in order to implement yet another financial strategy to attract and retain officers to begin filling these vacant positions as soon as possible. It must be noted that the un - budgeting of vacant officer positions was done strictly to offset the above stated plan to increase our police department's pay, and not to assist with any other position's pay or municipal service expense. The above stated amounts determined as increases for the police department were the result of the available sum total of funding from the vacant positions. Had there been more funding in these vacant positions, the amount of increases would likely have been higher. Another significant pay item that is worth noting is that of the EMS Department. In short, I have struggled to correctly estimate the EMS Department salary lines when developing each of my budgets the past three years. EMS has the most complicated pay arrangement of all departments, CoVid-19 and staff shortages have not made this any easier. It was brought to my attention this year that changes to the shift scheduling were made that we had not sufficiently budgeted for. We have therefore attempted to adjust for this. Additional changes will be discussed under the New Position category below. By request of the Municipal Judge, a step plan has been proposed and included in the Proposed FY23/24 Budget unless otherwise directed by the City Council. Having gone many years without a significant pay increase, the Municipal Judge has requested a scale that places his position at 1/2 that of the City Attorney's Page 10 of 23