FRANKLIN
No one spoke during a public hearing concerning the City of Franklin’s proposed fiscal year 2017-2018 budget, held during a special called meeting on Monday evening. The council expects to take action on the proposed budget during the June 5 meeting.

Of concern to the council during a work session held one hour before the hearing and continued after was the fact that they had not yet received an official request for funding from Franklin City Public Schools, and are scheduled to take action on the school’s 2017-2018 budget next Monday. To resolve this matter, the council plans to invite the members of the Franklin City School Board to attend another joint work session later this week.

In a previous joint work session with Franklin’s school board, the council learned that the board had initially planned to ask for a $350,000 increase from what they had been budgeted for fiscal year 2016-2017, but informed board representatives that the city did not have sufficient funds to meet that request. City representatives city informed the school board at a later board meeting that they had tentatively budgeted level funding for the division.

“I certainly don’t want any action we take to be construed as not supporting the schools; we want to support the schools, but it’s just a matter of magnitude and affordability at this time,” said Franklin Mayor Frank Rabil. “If they come in and ask for $350,000 [more], we’ve got a dilemma.”

Vice Mayor Barry Cheatham expressed concern that Franklin City Public Schools is already No. 2 in Virginia for how much money per student comes from the local government. However, Councilman Benny Burgess said that because Franklin’s school division has only around 1,000 students enrolled, it made sense that the amount that the city would need to contribute per student would be higher.

Aside from the school division’s budget, the only other matter discussed during Monday’s meeting was the organizations who had requested budget contributions from the city. A total of 28 organizations requested funding.

City Manager R. Randy Martin recommended the city provide level funding for most of the organizations and grant two new requests for funding from organizations that the city had not funded in the past, those two being Opportunity Inc. and the Roanoke River Basin Association.

Opportunity Inc., a workforce development organization, had requested $2,123 from the city for the coming fiscal year.

Martin said that the organization is requesting funding from every municipality in Southside Hampton Roads who participates in Opportunity Inc.’s programs.

Rabil agreed that funding for Opportunity Inc. was worth including in the budget.

“Opp-Inc. Was very instrumental when the mill closed; they set up workshops at the college and they’re still there today,” he said. “They trained unskilled people transitioning from paper making jobs to other types of jobs so they could be employed. There were no fees involved in that. Now they’re asking for some help.”

The Roanoke River Basin Association, or RRBA, is an environmental protection organization dedicated to, among other goals, the preservation of Lake Gaston, which sits on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. Martin said that many of the regional municipalities are making per capita contributions to the RRBA for the coming fiscal year to ensure that the lake remains a viable source of surface drinking water.

He argued that this was in the city’s interest, even though currently the city’s water source is 100 percent groundwater, because if the lake were ever to become unusable as a source of drinking water, its surrounding municipalities would have to turn to the already-strained Potomac Aquifer as an alternate source, and possibly impact the city’s groundwater withdraw permit from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

Martin recommended the city contribute $247 to the RRBA, based on Franklin’s current population of 8,535. Other participating municipalities include Isle of Wight, Southampton, Chesapeake, Gloucester, Hampton, James City, Newport News, Norfolk, Poquoson, Portsmouth, Smithfield, Suffolk, Surry, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg and York.