After a marathon four-hour meeting Tuesday night that included some angry words from Mayor Ben Morris, the Slidell City Council passed an amended city budget for fiscal year 2008-2009.

The council voted to approve a total of $112,400 in cuts from the mayor’s proposed $47.9 million budget. Even though the cuts only represent 0.28 percent of the budget, the mayor and his administration objected to the way some of the cuts were presented, and Morris said he was “blindsided” by some of the 18 amendments the council attached to the budget.

Most of the cuts were for overtime pay to city employees in several departments. The Slidell Police Department took the biggest slice with $62,500 being chopped from its budget, while the Vehicles Maintenance Division received the smallest cut of $1,500. However, the council did allow a 3.9 percent pay raise for all city employees, while voting to keep their own salaries at the current rate of $18,750 a year. Morris and Chief of Police Freddie Drennan also turned down their 3.9 percent raises and will maintain their current annual salaries of $104,212 and $93,791, respectively.

Drennan said the cuts to his budget in overtime would be a challenge.

“But we will work with what we have,” he said.

Morris was especially upset with the council turning down a 15 percent increase in the salary of the Director of Cultural and Public Affairs. The amendment for the raise failed because no one on the council would give a second to the motion, killing the bill. Morris said the city has to increase salaries to some of its directors in order to attract and hire qualified employees. He told the council he was afraid Cultural and Public Affairs Director Kim Bergeron may start looking elsewhere for a job.

On the other hand, the council approved an 11 percent increase in the salary of the city engineer.

The cuts in the budget were not disputed by the mayor, but he butted heads with the council over a proposed amendment that would put all the money cut from the budget into a special fund that would go to matching grants for capital improvement projects.

Council President Ray Canada said the fund was important to the city when applying for grants. The grantors want to make sure the city has the matching funds for the grants.

Canada said the city needs to write a lot of grants for drainage control.

“These projects will affect half of the city. It is very important we do this,” Canada said.

But Morris and Finance Director Sharon Howes said creating the fund would leave the city without enough funds to address emergencies, such as another hurricane.

“Why do this now?” Morris asked the council. “We can open the budget later and appropriate money for this fund.”

Howes added she would like to wait five months to see if her predictions of sales tax revenue will cover the cuts and the fund.

But council members Joe Fraught and Bill Borchert said sales tax revenue is not keeping pace with the city’s spending, and the city needs to plan for the future.

“We have to look forward more than a year or two. Slidell’s economy is soft, and it concerns me,” Borchert said.

Despite their concerns, the Council voted the creation of the fund down by a vote of 1 to 7, with Canada voting for it. Council member Kevin Kingston was absent from the meeting.

In the interim, the council voted on each of the eight amendments that would cut departments’ budgets with another amendment that in the future, the money will go into a reserve fund for matching funds of capital grants. The fund was not officially created by the council, but Howes will have to start the fund when the 2008-2009 budget goes into effect July 1.

The amended budget was passed by a 7-1 vote with Councilwoman Kim Harbison voting against it. It now goes before Morris for his approval or veto. If Morris vetoes the amended budget, the council will have until June 30 to come up with a revised budget.