BATON ROUGE - Attendees at Wednesday's Metro Council meeting cheered as the council approved a motion to give city-parish employees pay raises. 

The measure comes after the council approved pay raises for the Baton Rouge Police Department, making BRPD the highest-paid municipal police force in Louisiana. 

Constable Terrica Williams, whose department did not receive raises alongside BRPD, spoke with WBRZ and said her department had lost employees to the city police due to pay disparities. After BRPD raises and before Wednesday's vote, starting officers were making $17,000 more than constables. 

Mayor-President Sid Edwards told WBRZ that he spoke with Williams and told her that he was pushing for raises once pay bumps for BRPD were finalized. 

Edwards' item on the agenda for Wednesday included raises for constables, finance department employees, mail workers and Department of Public Works employees. It did not include raises for the constitutional offices. 

"I feel like we accomplished something. You know they talk about if its not enough, but I just think anything is better than nothing," Williams said. 

Edwards' office said his proposed plan moved funding from frozen positions into the city-parish general fund and redistributed it among employees with the lowest salaries. The pay raises will cost the city-parish $4.2 million, with an annual cost of $8 million. 

"If these positions have been open for three, four, five, seven years, why do we need them?" Edwards said. 

According to a 2024 pay study, the lowest-paid city-parish employees make less than $11. Edwards' plan would bump their pay 3.5% and set a minimum hourly rate of $12.53. 

While, the raises passed with a ten to one vote, some members of the council still had some concerns about how this will impact the city-parish financial system in the future.

"I don't love paying for this by freezing positions. If we are looking at freezing positions to pay for this, why are we not instead looking at deleting positions? What happens if in the future, we do this , and slowly we start unfreezing some of those positions, and all of sudden now we're having to pay for it," Metro Councilman Dwight Hudson said. 

Metro Councilman Anthony Kenney says the raises for city-parish employees is long overdue.

"There's going to be problems everyday, something's going to come up, its something we may not see down the line, that might pop up next week, but as council members our job is to put 12 of our heads, and minds, along with the mayors administration and  find solution to those problems," Kenney said. 

Pay rises should go into effect on June 27, and employees will see raises on their paychecks in mid-July.