Members of the Jamestown City Council listen to proposed budgets from department heads Tuesday. P-J photo by Christopher Blakeslee

During a working session of the Jamestown City Council, members began reviewing the 2024 budget proposed by Mayor Eddie Sundquist.

Councilwoman and mayoral candidate, Kim Ecklund, R-At Large, pointed out that bond payments on the proposed $6.8 million bond act proposed earlier this year by Sundquist weren’t included in the proposed budget and that the estimated interest payments could be well into the six-figures.

“I don’t see a bond payment in the budget,” Ecklund said. “(It’s a) $164,000 payment, but I’m going to say $160,000 for the sake of argument,”

Sundquist said the City Council hasn’t passed a bond resolution yet so he couldn’t include a bond payment in his proposed budget. The bond the city is looking to acquire will be allocated for internal city infrastructure improvements such as $1.8 million to replace the municipal building roof and do facade work; $400,000 for security enhancements; $350,000 for window replacements; $500,000 for a Bergman Park waterline replacement; $2 million toward Fenton Mansion roof repairs; and $1 million to complete the new central fleet garage on Washington Street.

However, another point was raised regarding a spam-filtering software subscription.

“The Sendio three-year renewal, unfortunately was not in the budget for some reason,” said Mark Dean, city information services director.

“Yeah, it wasn’t in the originally submitted budget, so it didn’t make it into the executive budget,” Sundquist responded. “But we were notified afterwards of it.”

“There was notification before the executive budget, but it must have not got added,” Dean countered. “That Sendio is our spam filter, our first line-of-defense for protecting out city from Phishing virus and all that.”

Dean then alluded to the fact that the Sendio software renewal was $8,997.

Dean’s requested training budget was slashed in half from $3,000 to $1,500.

“I think we need to fill the full requested amount of $3,000,” Ecklund said.