Between giving themselves a raise, transferring funds among projects and getting started on next year's budget, money has become a pressing subject for the Provo Municipal Council.

At the Tuesday night meeting, the council voted 5-2 to up each member's annual salary about 25 percent, a move lauded by Chairman George Stewart as fair compensation for the time put in and degraded by opponents as the wrong message to be sending.

"Your proposal has generated quite a bit of buzz," Mayor Lewis K. Billings told the council members at a work session Tuesday, adding that city employees weren't happy with it.

Stewart, who introduced the resolution, said he took a $60,000 pay cut to be a Municipal Council member and believed upping the compensation to $12,000 annually instead of the current $9,576 was more appropriate because of the time spent. Several council members said they also quit jobs or turned jobs down because they couldn't do both.

Councilman Steve Turley, one of two who voted against the bill, said he agreed with Billings's concerns; budget deficits had resulted in city employees getting little or no cost-of-living increases and the correct procedure hadn't been followed before making the decision.

He had a slightly unusual suggestion to change the compensation package -- tie it to performance. "Maybe we ought to get paid for how much we're worth," he said. "If we bring in a balanced budget we'll get one compensation. If we stub our toe like we have for many years we get less."

Council salary is less than other Utah cities, but when all of the compensation package is included it is ranked fifth statewide. All of the raises together will increase the budget by less than $20,000 annually.

The budget has gotten a fair amount of talk time, with the council focusing its priorities on funding four new positions to increase zoning enforcement and economic development and also allocating more funding to the city cable channel to encourage communication. Councilwoman Barbara Sandstrom said after the zoning ordinances were changed, the need for zoning enforcement overwhelmed the current staff.

"I do feel like that's a very important part of the city, to keep the city functioning well, is being on track with the happenings of the city," she said.

Councilwoman Midge Johnson said an overarching goal was to increase occupied home ownership in Provo, and she said she believes the additional help in zoning enforcement will go a long way in pushing that goal.

"So we feel good about that, and part of that is enforcement of some of the rules and some of the ordinances that we put into place," she said.

Turley agreed zoning should be a top priority but said he wasn't sure adding more employees was the most efficient way to enforce it. He said he wants to build reserves that have been depleted over the past few years when the budget had a deficit. For the second year in a row, Provo has a surplus.

"This'll be the first year we're going to start scaling back some of the budgets," he said, adding the city's budget 10 years ago was less than two-thirds the size of last year's budget. "It's pretty disturbing how much things have grown."

Funding the cable channel, which now is funded through the energy department, helps city leaders in communicating with constituents, a task that can sometimes get difficult, says Johnson.

"Part of our problem, I think, as a council is it's hard to sometimes get our message out," Johnson said. "That's a great vehicle to inform people with a lot of different programs."

All of the council members ending up agreeing with the priorities, although all were in different levels of agreement. Sandstrom and Johnson said they were both happy with how it turned out and said they did what they could with the funding they had.

Turley said he was comfortable with the results, but less convinced. "We compromise on everything, don't wefi" he said.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D1.