DALTON, Ga. — Dalton Mayor Dennis Mock rarely has to break tie votes on the City Council. But his vote was needed to approve the city’s 2017 operating budget Wednesday night.

Mock and council members Tate O’Gwin and Denise Wood voted to adopt the budget, which contains $32.5 million in spending, down from $33.1 million in spending for 2016. Council members Gary Crews and Tyree Goodlett voted not to adopt the budget.

The budget contains a 2 percent payroll increase, which department heads can use to provide merit pay increases of up to 3 percent for employees based on performance evaluations with performance measures that will be given in June. This was a change from the first draft of the budget presented to the public last week that would have provided a 3 percent across-the-board pay increase for all employees.

The budget also has a .15-mill tax increase built in, which would bring in $490,255 based on current property evaluations. That would equal a $12.60 tax increase on a home valued at $100,000. That would bring the property tax rate to 2.656 mills.

Those items provided the biggest points of disagreement among council members.

Crews said he was very concerned about the possibility of a tax increase, which would not be final until the council sets its property tax rate next fall.

“We have a lot of small businesses concerned about that,” he said. “This has been a long, involved process, and I really thank the department heads and the council members for their work. But those concerns are out there, and I want to make sure that we don’t do anything that might hurt our small businesses.”

But Wood described the tax increase as “tentative,” saying that if the tax digest grows next year more than anticipated council members may not need to increase the tax rate.

“I’m not supportive of tax increases, but this one is rather small, and if our tax digest grows or our sales tax revenue grows we may not need to have a tax increase,” she said. “I felt we needed to move forward and not delay things. But I also believe we can make changes (in the budget) next year if we need to.”

O’Gwin said the vote was a tough one.

“No one likes to talk about raising taxes or cutting services,” he said.

Council members have cut property tax rates for the past nine years, and O’Gwin says they may have cut taxes when it wasn’t prudent to do so.

“We’ve run deficits the past two years,” he said. “We’ve got to be realistic about what it takes to run a city. Our job is not just to cut taxes but to make sure this city continues to thrive, not just next year but 20 and 30 years into the future, and we need to make the investments necessary to keep it thriving. Dalton needs to be able to retain the students who graduate from Dalton State College, and when our high school students graduate and go somewhere else to college, we need to make sure they want to come back here.”

Goodlett said he was concerned that the 3 percent across-the-board pay increase was changed to a merit increase.

“I’m concerned about fairness,” he said. “I know that some people work better than others. But I don’t think we need to be saying ‘You are going to get nothing. And you are going to get 3 percent.'”

The budget also calls for cutting $23,360 in hotel/motel tax funding for the Dalton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB). The city and Whitfield County had for several years provided $173,360 each to the CVB, but the Board of Commissioners in its 2017 budget approved last week set its funding at $150,000, and the city is cutting funding to keep the funding level equal.

John Davis, chairman of the CVB board, asked council members to reconsider that cut. He noted that the CVB is funded from the hotel/motel tax and its efforts to bring people to Dalton help that tax grow.

“The money the CVB raises helps fund a lot of other things because that tax money goes to a lot of other things,” he said.

Hotel/motel tax revenues have grown for six straight years. In  2015, the latest year for which complete numbers are available, the tax generated $1.6 million for Dalton and Whitfield County.

The budget, including the projected property tax increase, is balanced. The largest single source of revenue is the transfer fee from Dalton Utilities, which sends 5 percent of its total revenue to the city. The transfer fee in 2017 will be $10.2 million, up from $10 million in 2016.

The property tax is the second-largest source of revenue in the budget, with a projected $8.088 million next year, up from $7.96 million in 2016.

The city’s share of the 1 percent Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) is the third-largest source of revenue, with a projected $5.4 million in 2017, down from $5.6 million in 2016.