With the city’s next budget cycle set to begin in a few months, Mayor Scott Foster doesn’t see any way out of preparing to lay off police officers and firefighters.

“We are heading into the next year’s budget discussions $3 million in the hole,” said Foster.

“We knew last year that this next year was going to be rough so it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that we are going to have to lay people off.”

When asked how sure he is that some of the city’s public safety workers will lose their jobs, the mayor answered that it is “probable”.

“When you are working with a budget of $32 million and you start out $3 in the hole, that’s eight percent of your budget,” said Foster.

 “We are already doing everything we can to reduce costs this year. We have spent eight percent less this year than we spent at the same time the previous year.”

By the time former Sumner County principal Jim Butler was arrested and convicted of harassing a teacher with whom he had had a previous affair, it had also come to light that he used a district-issued computer and email address to send dozens of intimate emails to her.  

While such emails are in direct violation of the district’s email and Internet use policy, by the time they were discovered, there were much larger problems at hand, according to district spokesperson Jeremy Johnson.

“At that point, we had a situation that was becoming a criminal harassment case against one of our employees,” said Johnson, who added that the violation of the email policy faded into the background by comparison.