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Council hears budget proposals
By Kenny Green, kgreen@acnpapers.comkhageland@acnpapers.com
The Mesquite city council has begun work on the budget for next fiscal year’s budget.
Representatives from the information technology department, library and metro airport presented their department’s budget proposals for the upcoming year.
Director of information technology Zak LaJoie talked about goals the department had for the upcoming year.
LaJoie stated the department wanted to further consolidate the city’s servers to reduce operating expenses and downtown.
“We currently virtualize 22 of them right now,” he said.
The department also wants to reduce the amount of desktop computers in use by switching some to smart clients. The clients would run all their programs off one of the city’s servers. LaJoie said the city would save money by using the smart clients and it would allow the department to better maintain its level of service.
LaJoie added that the department was asking for funding to maintain network security through the use of an outside vendor.
“We recommend using service critical watch secure center,” he said.
Director of library services Jeannie Johnson told the council about the library’s impact on the community and what they were requesting for next year’s budget.
“There are five things those respondents to our survey requested,” she said, “More books, more DVDs, more hours, more children’s programming and more books on CD.”
Johnson detailed the amount of hours people spend using the library’s services. She said there were 476,916 items checked out last year from the library. The library also signed up 2,904 kids for the summer reading club last year.
“For every dollar spent there is a return of $5.93,” Johnson added.
According to Johnson, the library also submitted 34 original photos to the University of North Texas to be uploaded to a portal of Texas history.
Johnson stated the library would like to see an expansion of its virtual presence, an upgrade of its automation system and a reassessment of the main library’s collection within the near future.
“We would like to recover loses that resulted from budget constraints,” she said.
Some of the long term goals the library has include the expansion or reconstruction of the main library and a new branch built in the southeast area of the city.
The metro airport presented the council with updates detailing the fact they are planning to be self-sustaining based on revenue projections for next year.
“Only one goal (for the airport) was made clear – to pay off the debt service,” said Cynthia Godfrey, airport manager. “Revenues (next year) will exceed expenditures.”
Based on her numbers, Godfrey stated the airport should take in approximately $1.53 million in revenue, most of it from the sale of fuel. She added that the airport has a waiting list for hangar space and could increase its revenue if it had more hangars available. The airport also has submitted its master plan to TxDot for expansion of the runway.
“TxDot wants to combine them into two major parts to begin around 2014,” Godfrey said.
Godfrey also wants to see the rules and regulations removed from the city code book and revised to better serve the airport and its customers.
“It is outdated,” she said. “It needs to be taken out of the city code book. It is only a guideline and is not enforceable except by ease agreement.”
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