Du Quoin may end employee pay freeze early

Du Quoin Mayor Guy Alongi said he may be willing to discuss ending the pay freeze for city employees sooner than expected, if the April revenues continue to look as promising as February and March's have.

Laborers Local 773 and nonunion city employees have had their pay frozen since the dawn of 2021 and were expecting to have it stay that way until July 1, when both parties would revisit the city revenue. Local 773 accepted the pay freeze in negotiations, while the nonunion employees got the pay freeze by degree.

The city of Du Quoin asked for the freeze before the end of 2020, worried that the pandemic could wreck city finances if they didn't take steps to mitigate. The city also cut back on its own expenditures, raised property taxes to pay for an expected shortfall in pension funds to be paid out in 2021, and delayed major expenditures, like a new backhoe for the water department.

However, the city's sales tax revenue continues to surprise officials by being higher than expected, even though Alongi tempers his enthusiasm by pointing out that when you take the Consumer Price Index into account, the city is "behind the curve."

Compared to 2019, the last "normal" year, Du Quoin isn't matching the pace of inflation. "Dollar for dollar, we're $76,000 behind the curve for 2019," Alongi said. Therefore the city should remain "cautiously optimistic" about its numbers, "because our numbers are not keeping up with the CPI."

"We want our employees to stay with the rate of inflation," in their lives, Alongi added, "but the city isn't staying with the rate of inflation."

But, the mayor added, if the city revenue are in the neighborhood of 2019, "we can at least honor our agreement."

The agreement was for laborers to get a 54-cent raise in 2021. A lump-sum payment to each employee on March 1 covered 17 cents of that raise, which leaves 37 cents still unaccounted for.

The April numbers, Alongi said, will tell the city what they can expect going forward. April's revenues were actually collected in January, as revenues come to municipalities two months late.