BILLINGS — Billings City Administrator Chris Kukulski is currently in the second year of a three-year contract. After Kukulski's annual performance evaluation back in October, City Council is postponing approval for his pay increase, saying it would send the wrong message to the public while discussions surrounding the city's water bills are ongoing.
Issues surrounding the city's water bills have been brought up extensively in the past several months. An audit is currently being conducted to make sure that residential utility bills are accurate.
"Chris was not directly involved with the migration of software, but it has caused a lot of consternation. And so, Chris was okay with our delaying that decision until we get the results of the utility bill audit, which we don't expect it yet for a couple months," said Mayor Bill Cole Friday. "Every year, we do an evaluation of the city administrator and Chris has been with us since about 2018…And this year the majority of the council gave Chris very good marks."
The contract for the position of City Administrator stipulates that if the city didn't want it to renew automatically for another three years, they would have to give notice 12 months in advance, before December 1.
"Councilmember Kennedy wanted the public to know how the contract worked. And of course, we have no objection to that, and so
we're happy to talk about that with anybody," said Mayor Cole. "But we did have a vote on whether to give that notice of non-renewal. And the vote was not to put that on a future agenda, meaning that it will automatically renew pursuant to the terms of the contract that have been there ever since Chris started in 2018."
Billings Ward 3 Councilmember Bill Kennedy said he thought this was a topic that was important to share with the public.
"That's fine, but for transparency purposes on everything, I think we need to discuss it. I know a lot of these things are personnel, but overall they affect the public. And those are the things that should be transparent enough," said Councilmember Kennedy Sunday. "All I was asking for is to have it on the last Monday of the month and to be able to discuss, are we going to let it roll over for a three-year contract...And six to five just said no, let it, they didn't want to discuss it."
With the automatic renewal of this three-year contract, Kukulski will retain the position of City Administrator for the next four years. However, his $212,628 a year salary is still up for discussion.
"It's a lot of money here in Montana. But to put it in perspective, it's about $90,000 [more], the value of his total compensation package, than exists in Bozeman, for example," Mayor Cole said. "Similarly, it's about $90,000 less than Greeley, Colorado, Loveland, Colorado, which are comparably size cities or smaller. It is a little bit more, $10,000, $15,000 more than Belgrade, Great Falls, Kalispell, but those are cities substantially smaller than Billings, and do not have the challenges of running Billings."
Mayor Cole said city employees will receive pay increases of about four percent this year.
"I would expect that when we come back to this issue that Chris will be in line for something similar, unless something comes from the utility bill audit. That, I don't currently expect but we don't know," said Mayor Cole. "As far as I'm aware, no one has identified any sort of pattern of error that has resulted in overcharging our customers. But we want to make sure that we get the results of the audit back before making any decisions about Chris's compensation."
"It was determined that we would wait after the water bill audit, and everything's over. We've taken care of that, and it's met a satisfactory resolution," Councilmember Kennedy said. "Then we would sit down and talk about anywhere from six weeks to six months, talk about the salary."
Kennedy said that the council's number one priority right now is the audit but he said he hopes transparency will be another priority for the city moving forward.
"I just think we should be more informed. You have a council of 10 council people. We should, if we're going to make these decisions for the taxpayer, we should know them. This hasn't been the best year for homeowners and the taxpayers," said Councimember Kennedy. "When we did the changeover from the billing process, it was never discussed. It was told to us exactly what would take place, and this would be the rates, and this would be moving."
He hopes for more communication in the future so that the city could be better prepared if issues like the water bill situation happen again.
"The council is only in charge of the city administrator. We cannot go into department heads, we cannot go into any of those. We work through the city administrator," Councilmember Kennedy said. "And the council needs to decide all the way through, are you taking care of these things? Because the department heads work for him, and it's time that the city administrator needs to make sure we don't have these large problems that affect the taxpayers. And that's very important...How do we make it so it's kinder and friendlier to the taxpayers and to the folks. And those are some things that I think the council needs to look at over the next year is, how do you bring back trust to the city."
