By Melanie Patterson

The North Jefferson News



Warrior City Council members on Tuesday held a second special-called meeting regarding the city’s financial crisis, but again took no action.

“It looks like we’re going to have to make a $150,000 cut” this year compared last year, said Mayor Rena Hudson during the meeting. “We’re going to have to have to come up with some way to reduce our spending. We’re not going to be able to adopt a budget until we do.”

The City of Warrior did not adopt or operate under a budget last year. However, Hudson said she wants the city to cut $150,000 from expenditures partly in order to pay back a loan of $100,000 that the city borrowed last year.

Hudson said the cut does not include a 10-percent “rainy day fund” that the city is reportedly required by law to build into the budget.

Among the ideas that council members batted around to cut expenses were temporarily eliminating demolitions of abandoned buildings, halting donations to schools, doing away with employees’ cell phones, charging residents for brush pickup, charging neighboring cities to run car tags and charging for use of the city’s ball fields.

Councilman Jimmy Jett said he was still in favor of reviewing the budget line-by-line to eliminate expenses that are not crucial to the city’s operation.

He also encourages Warrior residents to shop in Warrior whenever possible so that the city will benefit from the tax revenue.

“I see we might need to lay somebody off, but … before we do that, let’s please do everything we can,” said councilman Brad Fuller. “We’ve got to cut out everything we can. And it still probably won’t be enough, but we’ve got to give it a try.”

Hudson asked all city supervisors to come up with budgets for their departments in order to help the city council write a new city budget.

“We’ll just have everybody take their particular department to see what cuts can be made,” said Hudson.

The council has not yet set a date for the next financial meeting.