Hanceville will benefit from bigger revenues in the coming year, approving a new budget for FY 2021-2022 that exceeds the previous year’s budget by more than $700,000.

At its latest regular meeting, the Hanceville City Council beat the Sept. 30 deadline to approve a new budget with a $5.46 million expense package that includes a number of initiatives to boost employees’ pay and add to city services.

This year’s $5,495,712 in budgeted expenses outpaces last year’s $4.67 expensed budget, with the city’s projected revenues of more than $5.9 million also leaving an additional $436,000 of wiggle room through the end of next year. Like all municipalities, Hanceville’s fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 of 2021 to Sept. 30 of 2022.

Hanceville employees will receive two separate pay increases in the coming year, said mayor Kenneth Nail.

“As part of next year’s budget, employees will get a regular step raise of about 2.5%, plus a cost of living raise which is also about 2.5%,” he said.

“One other thing we’re able to do is to reduce the employee’s out-of-pocket contribution to their family insurance premiums. Right now, we pay all the employees’ insurance, but for years the employee had to pay $250 a month for their family coverage,” he added.

“We’ve been able to move that down to $200. I’m also hoping that we can start talking about a few other things at our upcoming meetings to help stay competitive with offering our employees some additional benefits, like adding an extra paid holiday and maybe looking at a looking at a plan to use accumulated sick pay as a bereavement payout in the event that an employee passes away,” said Nail.

Thanks to two infusions of federal COVID-19 relief money — one this year and another coming next year — the city also has approved a number of upgrades to the city’s civic center, which already has served as an emergency staging area for natural disasters and community handouts of COVID-related preventive gear.

The city is also moving forward with plans to add new space to its jail facility at city hall as part of the new budget, an expansion Nail said described as a “necessary evil.”

“No one gets excited about expanding the jail, but it’s a necessary evil that addresses a problem we can’t look away from,” he said. “We’re running out of space. We’ve budgeted the funds this year to make those improvements, because there may not be another time when we have this kind of opportunity to do it.”