Wolfe rides on the support of partnerships in State of the City address

In the midst of beginning to feel the effects of the economic recession trickling down from the federal government, Huntington mayor Kim Wolfe focused on the partnerships that have continued to further city growth in his State of the City address on Feb. 13.

To emphasize his point about people working together, Wolfe started with a reform that probably took the most organizations collectively for it to succeed. A first major step to solving Pension Reform was put forth with new pension options.

“This was an issue that had been plaguing our city for 14-plus years,” Wolfe said.

One initiative that has been a part of most of the mayor’s accomplishments this year has been in partnership with the city’s citizens and the Huntington City Council.

The User Fee was increased by a dollar and with it new equipment was purchased for the Street and Traffic Engineering divisions, more than 800,000 worth of streets was paved and six more police officers were hired.

Much of the actions put into place because of the increase in the User Fee have been bolstered by other resources. In addition to the six police officers hired, the Huntington Police Department received 1.6 million in grant funding. This saw a 5.9 percent increase from last year with the number of responses to service calls and the sustainability of the Special Emphasis Unit and K-9 Unit.

To keep up with the work being done on the streets, the Weed and Seed program, in addition to increasing drug arrests and seeing an increase in criminal convictions, have improved the housing community with 21 first-time home buyers, five new homes built and the demolishment of 29 structures. The Technical Housing Unit has also contributed by averaging 129 inspections per month of unsafe structures.

These works and more are in conjunction with the goals of Wolfe’s administration to support a cleaner, safer and more responsive government.

For the upcoming months, the mayor said the task will be to make sure these improvements and others will not be jeopardized because of having to reduce the budget by about 5 million from last year.

“The goal is to ensure that service delivery is not significantly hampered to the citizens,” Wolfe said.

Plans in place to follow through on that statement are to eliminate only some jobs and have rolling 20-day furloughs for city employees. Within the police and fire departments, some civilian positions will be removed and this will cause the level of service from first responders to be affected. Also, vacant city positions will be left unfulfilled and retiring employees will not be replaced.

The mayor was upfront about these initiatives having an effect on the safety of Huntington’s citizens, but he plans on addressing those problems by using same thing he attributes his accomplishments to.

“I am confident in the ability and leadership of the Huntington City Council to work side by side with us to solve these challenges,” Wolfe said.