The Murray City Council has passed its fiscal year 2015 budget, including a $250,000 capital project to finance the construction of a new fire station on the north end of town.
The action came at Thursday night’s meeting after the ordinance to adopt the budget’s second reading.
Mayor Bill Wells said the city’s third fire station is much needed.
“We’ve worked on this for a long time and now it’s come to fruition to try to go ahead and build the one out north,” Wells said. “We’re looking at the community planning for the fire and the police and now we’ve even purchased some areas out on Johnny Robertson Road. This is a big night for the safety, I think, of the citizens of Murray.”
Wells said the new station will allow for a citywide emergency response time of 3-4 minutes.
The budget also allows for $1 million from the city's utility fund to finance the design and construction of the wastewater treatment plant upgrades.
The total number of budgeted expenditures for the city is just north of $38 million, working from projected available funds of more than $42 million. That’s a 5 percent decrease in available funds from the year before, but coupled with a 10 percent decrease in expenditures.
Councilwoman Linda Cherry cast the lone dissenting vote against the budget, citing a funding discrepancy between Murray Main Street’s $25,000 appropriation and other nonprofits’ - such as the Murray Art Guild and Gentry House - smaller sums. She said as long as that discrepancy was present in city budgets, she could not vote in the affirmative.
