SOUTH PITTSBURG, Tenn. - Residents found plenty to be angry about at the South Pittsburg City Commission's May meeting, including the announcement that budget cuts have forced the closure of the city pool at Loyd Park.
"That's all these kids have around here," one resident shouted to the board. "We need to try to get some money together for these kids."
Resident Dora Fennell agreed and said children in town need something to do.
"They need something that's going to keep them active and out of trouble," she said.
Mayor Virgil Holder said the board is still working on the next fiscal year's budget and will announce when a workshop is convened to discuss it further.
"We are having to make some cuts and trimming our budgets back, but that's what we said we were going to do, so that's what we're working forward to," he said.
Holder said the pool costs a lot to maintain, and "we just do not have that money."
The pool is "way out" of the budget right now, he said.
"They [kids] need something, and they always had that pool," resident Willie Mae Kelso said. "We need to raise some money or something so they can have something to do in the summertime. That's all the black kids have."
She said cutting pool funding in the budget is "wrong," and suggested the National Cornbread Festival donate funds to help keep the pool open.
Another resident, Scott Collier, said one of the things that got him excited when Holder was elected in November was Holder's promise to address South Pittsburg's comparatively high property tax rate.
At 99 cents per $100, it's the highest in Marion County by far.
"I assume you're cutting back because our taxes are going to go back to where they should be," Collier told Holder.
The board is cutting where it can, Holder said, and if the tax rate could be lowered, it would.
"Am I going to sit here and tell you that it's going back to where it was four years ago?" he said to Collier. "No, sir. I will not tell you that."
City leaders transferred the last fiscal year's budget over to this year with the "same, identical numbers," Holder said, and South Pittsburg still "wound up $263,000 in the hole if we just operated like last year."
"We were not balanced last year, nor were we balanced the year before," he said. "So we are trying to bring her down."
According to the state comptroller's office, South Pittsburg got a clean audit opinion during the last fiscal year, and its fund balance increased $384,900 from the previous year.
In June 2016, the city repaid fully a debt of $802,890 from an improper transfer of funds by a former mayor, which was the original reason given for doubling the property tax rate in 2013.
Collier said he doesn't understand how taxes could be so high yet the city is still in the red.
"As a citizen, it's hard to see things going away, and our taxes staying double what they should be," he told the board. "I would be fine with that if we could at least keep what we've got, which we don't seem to be able to do."
"That's what we're working on," Holder said. "We [the board] have been here six months, and that's what we're working on."
Ryan Lewis is based in Marion County. Contact him at ryanlewis34@gmail.com.