LORAIN, Ohio — Monday night’s Lorain City Council meeting was filled with heated comments and frustration as a recent audit reveals dozens of city employees are making six figures.
On the agenda was the first reading of the proposed budget for this fiscal year.
In 2024, Lorain’s payroll records show $42.6 million in personnel costs. It’s a significant increase from the $36 million spent on employee payroll the previous year.
The proposed budget allocates a large chunk of it to police and fire, more than $27 million.
Lorain City auditor Joseph Koziura told News 5 Monday that the city is simply spending more than it makes annually.
Last year ended with a $9.8 million cash balance. That money was down from $13 million at the end of 2023 and has been slowly dwindling in recent years.
A list of city salaries provided by the auditor shows the highest-paid employees, including the command staff for both the police and fire departments. Police Chief Jim McCann made over $235,000 in gross wages, while the fire chief made over $220,000.
Adding up how many city employees make six figures, that number is 131.
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“Each department and where the money goes hit the internet. It's ridiculous,” longtime Lorain resident Jayne Morales said. “You have to earn those raises, and they didn't earn these raises. We are in a huge deficit. They're acting like nothing's wrong."
Morales believes one of the biggest contributors to the problem of high salaries is “we hire family.”
Tia Hilton echoes the same frustration. She doesn’t live in Lorain, but she said she has family that does, and she works in the city.
“I may not live in the city, but I pay rates in the city and I have business in the city,” she said. “These people are elected to build up their city. You can't build a foundation brick by brick like this. You're tearing everything that your parents and grandparents have built as a legacy. You're tearing it down by allowing this to happen.”
This is all while Lorain Councilman Dan Nutt said the city is looking at an estimated $3.3 million deficit.
“Unfortunately, in a budget for a municipality, there's a lot of departments. There's a lot of line items for each department and there's just a lot going on,” Nutt said. “That doesn't make people happy. As I said in council, I'm not thrilled about that. It is my experience from years past that expenses are overestimated, and revenue is underestimated.”
At Monday's meeting, many solutions to reducing expenses were discussed, including a hiring freeze, a pause on raises granted this year, and layoffs.
“Cut your costs. I have to balance my checkbook. We all have to balance our checkbooks. We all have to make cuts. I can't buy Doritos every week, right? Like we have to make cuts. Make some damn cuts, and they won't,” Morales said.
Nutt said the police and fire union contracts are negotiated and finalized before going before the council, adding that those contracts have already been approved.
“We are more or less stuck with that whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view. The only thing that I believe could be up for discussion would be the raises that were passed for elected officials,” Nutt said. “I do think that pay for elected officials should, as it should for every employee, keep up with inflation and cost of living, but I think those raises were a little heavy.”
Nutt said that even cutting those raises may save the city only $200,000.
“That is just a drop in the bucket. Two hundred thousand dollars is nothing to just wave away, so that is absolutely something we should look at,” he said.
While Nutt hasn’t compared Lorain city employees’ salaries, more specifically the police chief and fire chief, to those of neighboring municipalities, he agrees that it’s high.
“It is more expensive to attract and retain,” Nutt said.
Although the proposed budget underwent its first reading on Monday, a motion was made to suspend rules and cast a vote. It failed as three council members rejected the idea.
“I'm hoping during the second reading that the rules are suspended so we can have a robust discussion and go back and forth and address people's concerns about the contracts, the pay raises for the elected officials and other things in the budget as well,” Nutt said.
Nutt added the budget doesn’t allow for new hires, so “technically,” the city is on a hiring freeze.
If a hiring freeze were put up for an official vote, though, Nutt would vote yes with the stipulation that police are not lumped in.
Nutt has been in office for four years but will not be seeking reelection for various reasons, one of which is the "political theatrics" he has seen over the years and how the budget is now being impacted.
“I'd like to be a little more brass tacks and let's go through it line item by line item and find out where we can cut, where we can't cut. Let's get this thing passed and move on because the citizens don't want us in there debating each other just so that we look good in front of a camera,” Nutt said.
Morales hopes the finalized budget for this fiscal year will reflect the best use of taxpayer dollars, including better roads, infrastructure, and safety features.
She plans to continue voicing her concerns but feels it may not matter.
“I’m not giving up. I’m not. There's a couple of us that aren't going to give up and I'm going to do everything I can to get more and more people here every week because that's the only thing that we can do and to get more of you guys here. That's the only way we're going to get the word out,” Morales said.
Hilton requested a forensic audit in 2019 regarding Lorain utilities. It shows ratepayers were “extorted, taken advantage of, and burdened.”
She said she was hoping city council would have looked differently at their finances afterward, but that she was wrong.
“It said the city was going to be bankrupt by the year of 2026. We warned them with that financial audit and they didn't listen to me. They didn't listen to nobody,” Hilton said.
The deadline to pass this fiscal year’s budget is April 1.
The next Lorain City Council meeting will be the first Monday of March.
