Final Budget Session For St. Mary Aldermen Over In Minutes

The fourth of four work sessions devoted to the city of St. Mary’s budget situation was the shortest, ending less than four minutes after the Pledge of Allegiance was said.

Last Thursday’s work session was a special meeting that took place on what is not a regular meeting night for the St. Mary Board of Aldermen.

Board president Brian Helms made a statement on behalf of the board, saying he had met with city clerk David Woods and talked with fellow board members about a course of action to be taken in the near future — likely including items on the agenda next week.

“We got so much work done early that this is not going to be a very long meeting at all, because we have already kind of come to a consensus,” Helms said to the few members of the public in attendance. …

Helms said the board still had “some details to go over.”

“We won’t do that tonight,” he said. “We’re going to be presenting these options for a vote at our regular meeting in April on the general fund issues, and we’ll be including them in our agenda for posting at that time for our meeting in April, and we’ll also have another regular meeting in May that we will address those issues.”

When Helms said that was all he had to report, Mayor Gloria Bader asked, “You mean, we all came down here for this?”

See complete story in the April 3 edition of the Herald.