MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris says he is ready to do some slicing and dicing as he prepares to take his budget to the County Commission this week.

Mayor Harris will present his budget proposal on Wednesday, and told WREG that he wants to make the county an example that others will follow.

“How do you navigate a really, really tough year without new revenues given that our costs are skyrocketing,” Harris said. “At the same time, we’ve got to be respectful of the hard work of our employees.”

Mayor Harris said his answer is to do something different.

When he goes before County Commissioners, he plans to go with a request for county workers to get a raise.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to lead the way and be able to convince Commissioners that now’s the time to give a raise to our employees if Shelby County government is leading the way and role modeling, what other organizations should do,” Harris said. “It makes the conversation, expresses the conversation out and it means that other organizations are gonna be more apt to say, ‘Hey, we need to follow Shelby County’s lead. And we need to try to find a way to respond to the high inflation that our employees are under. We need to try to give them a raise.’ So we’re just trying to lead the way.”

It won’t be cheap and it comes when the county is also having to dig deep to give more to schools, fix problems at the Shelby County Jail and also consider building a new mental health facility.

“I’m gonna continue to apply my scalpel to the budget and try to make as many cuts as possible so we can avoid having to get to the question of property taxes and how much property taxes might be,” Harris said.

Just across the Mall, Memphis’ Mayor, Paul Young, has already alerted citizens he would be asking for a property tax increase in his budget.

So, what is the county contemplating to get funds in?

“Still to be determined,” Harris said. “It’s a really, really tough process and we’ve got to first make sure that we identify efficiencies and we cut costs as much as possible.”

That begs the question, is a County tax increase totally off the table?

“This is my sixth budget that I’ll deliver, of course, across all those previous budgets, I’ve never proposed a property tax increase,” Harris said. “And in fact, in one of those budget years, I proposed a property tax cut. So, we’re going through that process and we’ve been going through their process for many weeks, but I’ve still got 48 hours left.”

Mayor Harris will take his budget to the County Commission on Wednesday morning at 8.