Somerset council looks at budget for parks, first responders

May 24—For the last couple of weeks, Somerset City Council members have been getting their first looks at the proposed budget for the 2024-2025 fiscal year.

That includes checking in with the heads of those departments to learn more about what they may need in the upcoming year, as well as what new might be in store for Somerset's citizens.

At the Tuesday, May 14 budget workshop, Somerset Mayor Alan Keck kicked off the meeting by telling councilors that in the next few weeks they will get a detailed plan on a possible overhaul of SomerSport Park, which will fall in with a sports tourism grant that the city recently received.

Those plans, Keck said, would allow the city's Parks Department to turf almost all the fields at SomerSport, making the current soccer areas a multi-use field for soccer, football, and "a little bit of baseball if we have an expansion," according to Keck.

The park would also receive added lighting and a reworked parking lot to ease congestion, he said.

The full proposal with artists' renderings would be brought to the council at a later date, Keck said, but would be available before the council votes on the overall budget.

"I think it's a necessary expansion. I think the community's asked for it for a long time," Keck said.

Additionally, Keck said, "On the horizon, I'll just say, an indoor tennis and pickleball facility, I think, could be a home run. There's a possibility to do that in a different part of SomerSport, with a little public-private partnership."

He said he also wants to look at adding mountain bike trails to the Somerset area as a complement to the ones already found at Pulaski County Park.

Keck noted that those trails are in the early stages, but adding some to Somerset would help propel the area into becoming the mountain biking capital of Kentucky.

From parks to emergency services, the council looked at the budgets for the Police, Fire and EMS departments during the same workshop.

For the Somerset-Pulaski County EMS department, Keck made a special point to mention that the budget reflected the $150,000 that County Fiscal Court had agreed to give in an intense back and forth negotiation between the two governments.

"It was tense, heated, (and) challenging, but we got to a resolution that I think works for both parties," Keck said of the new agreement between city and county.

Councilors also noted the budget listed an $850,000 "bad debt" line item, which Chief Steven Eubank said was the expected amount that EMS will bill and cannot collect.

The issue is that EMS will fix a price for a service, but Medicare, Medicaid and other insurances may not cover the full cost of that, and patients who are expected to make up the difference can't pay.

Eubank said that with Medicaid, the department has to "accept what they pay," as they do with some Medicare plans.

"And if we made our rates just the Medicare and Medicaid rates, we wouldn't be able to get as much as possible out of commercial insurance," he said.

Somerset Chief Financial Officer Mike Broyles said they still had to list the full price as "revenue" for the budget, but then write off what they don't receive as a matter of proper bookkeeping.

"If you take off the write-offs, you've got to lower your revenue. So if you take one off, you have to take it off the other, so your net effect will still be the same," Broyles said.

Eubank also told council members that he was working to attract quality employees to ease the understaffing that his department has seen in the last few months. The main thing that is hurting them in that regard, he said, was the large run volume the department sees.

"As we get our staffing up to full, that's going to improve as well," he said.

Staffing has also been an issue for the Somerset Police Department, and Acting Chief Josh Wesley said that he is likewise working on recruitment. The problem he has, however, is that simply hiring someone isn't enough to get them on the street and working as a full-time patrolman. They also have to go through a 20-week academy as well as spend several months in training on the job.

"I can hire 10 people tomorrow and it won't help us for a year and a half (or) two years out," Wesley told the council. "We're trying to play catch up on staffing."

The good news is that he does have five people in line to go to the academy, and the department has four on the streets who are in training.

He said the department currently has 40 full-time sworn officers, and hiring two more people would get the department up to a full compliment of 48.

As for the Somerset Fire Department, the question facing staff there isn't so much not having the people as it is how to schedule them.

Chief Bengie Howard and Mayor Keck told council that they have decided to put a new-to-the-department scheduling plan in place for a two-year trial to see if it helps.

The department is switching to a straight 24/48 schedule — where crew work for a 24-hour shift, then get 48 hours off.

The previous schedule was what is known as a 24/48 Kelly structure, where crew still work for 24 hours, then get 48 off, but every so often (traditionally, every seventh shift) the crew would have an extra day off.

Those "Kelly" days would be covered with part time employees, Keck explained.

Keck said that the new schedule may cause overtime pay to go up, but it would allow for less part-time payroll, he said.

As long as the new schedule is supported financially, they will continue with the new schedule, Keck said.

He also told councilors that the Fire Department's budget included $900,000 for the purchase of a new fire truck.

"We think that's probably on the high end of what it will cost us, but in today's post-COVID world and supply chain world, it could run up there," he said, adding that it is more than the previous truck cost.

Howard defended the purchase however, by saying that the department is seeing a "drastic increase" on maintenance costs on the trucks they currently have.

One truck in their fleet is five years old and currently has more than 250,000 miles on it, which is a lot for a fire truck, he said.

Howard added, "We do not have any supplemental apparatus, so you're one call — you're one call — away from not having the proper amount of coverage that the city requires by our ISO standards."

Plus, by waiting, the city will lose money in the long run.

"I do know that in the years to come (2025-2026), we're looking at almost a $60,000 increase just on the engine package alone," he said.

Carla Slavey can be reached at cslavey@somerset-kentucky.com