The Madison Common Council voted 13 to 5 against reconsidering the 2015 budget Tuesday, sending it to Mayor Paul Soglin who will have the option to either sign the current budget or veto it.

If Soglin vetoes the budget that the council passed last Tuesday, the council will need to work with the mayor to approve a budget by the beginning of December to give the city enough time to prepare and send taxes to residents.

Council members concerned after Soglin considers budget veto

Alders expressed concerns about making changes to the budget since they had already approved it, saying the changes Soglin proposed needed in-depth discussion and should have occurred earlier in the process.

Among those changes was Soglin’s proposal to increase city employees’ salaries from 1.5 to 2 percent, which several alders said was not well thought out and not enough time was devoted to the issue.

“It looks like if we don’t vote for this that we don’t care about you,” Ald. Denise DeMarb, District 16, said to the city employees at the meeting.

Soglin argued now is the time to act regarding wage parity for city employees. Using $100,000 cut from one item of the budget to fund the increase in wages would be a good way to use the money before it is used for other things, he said.

“I am precisely concerned about the fact that if parity is equity, if we do not make the commitment to it at this time this money is going to be spent elsewhere,” Soglin said.

Ald. John Strasser, District 14, said the mayor, council leadership and alders made mistakes in the budget process, but city employees will be the ones to pay for those mistakes if Soglin’s proposed increase isn’t approved.

Approving the increase now instead of down the road through a budget amendment was the best course of action, he said.

“Amend it tonight, amend it in January, amend it in June, there’s no difference,” he said.

If wage parity is truly important to the council, he said, alders should approve it in the budget, he said.

“We would rather leave a quarter of a percent raise for our employees on the table and scold each other for the process than to do what’s right and give our employees a small increment of what we’ve all said tonight that they deserve,” Strasser said.

More than a dozen supporters of an increase in city employee pay, including several city workers, attended the meeting and spoke in favor of the proposal to increase wages by more than the 1.5 percent proposed.

Ald. Scott Resnick, District 8, described the budget process as an evolution, stressing last-minute changes are not the way to make these cuts.

“It’s no way to make a decision, it’s no way to run a city,” he said.

Resnick is challenging Soglin in next year’s mayoral elections.

If the option to reconsider the entire budget was on the table, he said, he would be ready to make cuts to alders’ salaries to fund the increase for city workers.

Ald. Lauren Cnare, District 3, said parity was not a focus of the budget until after it passed.

“This was not part of the discussion at all, until basically last Wednesday or Thursday,” Cnare said.

If people said parity was a priority from the beginning it would have been different, she said, adding that the council’s commitment to future discussions on parity shows it’s serious about addressing the issue.

Cnare said parity is a big deal to many of people and said she expects people to be more vocal about the issue when future budgets are being proposed.

“I think 1.5 percent is a good start,” Cnare said. “I think they heard a pretty serious commitment that next year it will be a priority.”