2013 Budget: “This is not where we want to be”

By Randa Wagner -

So it began at last Wednesday’s final bud­get hear­ing with the Mor­row County commissioners.

Com­mis­sioner Tom Whis­ton made it clear that whit­tling away almost $1.5 mil­lion from county offices’ requests to meet the amount cer­ti­fied by the Bud­get Com­mitte was painful.

Com­mis­sioner Tom Harden agreed.

“We have to bal­ance this bud­get – we can’t have it be in the red,” Harden said. “Some­where along the line, we received requests this year for $8,471,929.48 and the bud­get com­mis­sion cer­ti­fied $6,991,928.19 – that’s quite a dif­fer­ence. We just didn’t have the money to ful­fill all the requests. We can only spend what’s given to us by the bud­get commission.”

Harden said the com­mis­sion, con­sist­ing of Trea­surer Dan Green, Audi­tor Mary Holtrey and Pros­e­cu­tor Charles How­land, are con­ser­v­a­tive about their numbers.

“That’s good for the county and good for us because if they cer­tify a big amount and we give you that amount and it doesn’t come in, we’d have to take money back away from you,” Harden explained to elected offi­cials in attendance.

The amount cer­ti­fied for the bud­get does not, how­ever, account for some lin­ger­ing debts the county has.

“We cur­rently have, out­stand­ing from the 2012 bud­get, about $430,000 in place­ment costs (with Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices) that we need to pay,” Whis­ton said. “That’s money that’s due and owing.”

He said the com­mis­sion­ers met with Don Wake and his staff to dis­cuss that very issue and are look­ing at dif­fer­ent avenues – whether it be state or fed­eral – to get some addi­tional funds.

“Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices gets approx. $150,000 a year from the state to pay these costs, with which a por­tion of that has to go to pay the match for the court and admin­is­tra­tive costs,” Whis­ton said. “We have about $50,000 a year to help cover what is approach­ing $500,000 a year.”

Whis­ton also noted the county has man­dated fund­ing items.

“We received a fil­ing last Fri­day from the com­mon pleas judges an order for man­dated requested fund­ing ($105,000),” he noted. “We’ve done that in the bud­get. We’re not going to go to court to fight an issue where some­body requested money that has the abil­ity to man­date it, and waste the county’s money just to find out we have to do it (anyway).”

Harden pointed out the county still owes $11,000 in med­ical bills for Shane Roush to the Mor­row County Hos­pi­tal as well.

“The prob­lem with that is we’ve been basi­cally spend­ing money that is now caught up to the point of that we’ve spent what was extra – and we still haven’t paid what we need to pay,” Whis­ton said.

Whis­ton said the new court­room is occu­pied now, but it brings an addi­tional $150,000 of debt annu­ally for about 25 years.

He added the com­mis­sion­ers will be pri­or­i­tiz­ing monies hereon, going to essen­tial ser­vices first, such as the sheriff’s office. The Mor­row County’s Sheriff’s office is in the low­est four tiers of pay in the State of Ohio.

“The jail has been cut close to 40%,” Sher­iff Steve Bren­ne­man said. “We do have the immi­gra­tion money com­ing in, but it’s not com­ing in like it did. Our salaries are com­pletely paid out of that immi­gra­tion fund. Last month’s pay-in would not cover a month’s worth of salaries. That could become a very big issue this year.”

Bren­ne­man said 50 ICE inmates are needed per day to cover costs, and many times recently they have been short.

Whis­ton believes local gov­ern­ment is where the fed­eral gov­ern­ment needs to put their focus and priority.

“Giv­ing $17 mil­lion F-16s to Egypt — who is cozy­ing up to Iran – I can’t jus­tify that,” he said. “Give me a mil­lion dol­lars and we can have you all happy and con­tent, from a stand­point you’re funded where you need to be.”

One sug­ges­tion to help alle­vi­ate the sit­u­a­tion is a plan to take advan­tage of any reim­burse­ment or match­ing funds the state has available.

“From a stand­point of pri­or­ity, if you have bud­getary funds that you’ve received matches (for) or will allow you to get addi­tional funds, we’re going to give that pri­or­ity,” Whis­ton said. “We’re going to max­i­mize every oppor­tu­nity we can to get funds.

Roads and safety forces are the top two issues he is focus­ing on with town­ships, and he plans to pur­sue addi­tional grant monies.

“Last year we lost three months of reim­burse­ments at Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices because they were not done on time – then you don’t get paid,” said Com­mis­sioner Dick Miller. “When we had another clerks of courts here (years ago), the girls in the com­mis­sion­ers office started doing that billing because the clerk wasn’t doing it prop­erly and timely, and we weren’t get­ting reim­bursed. We still have that activ­ity that we’re doing in this office that should be done by another office, and we should be hav­ing help from the courts to make sure that every time they can be reim­bursed for some­thing, that they do the paper­work properly.”

Mary Holtrey reit­er­ated that point.

“There’s a lot of times that things will come back from the state stat­ing they were filed too late and then we don’t get reim­bursed on them at all,” she said.

Whis­ton noted though the county is not in a good sit­u­a­tion, ‘we could be in a worse situation.’

“Any­one who thinks they need addi­tional monies — fine, but it has to be taken from another office,” he said. “Cut­ting staff or increas­ing insur­ance pre­mi­ums is another option.”

“We’re not required to give employ­ees insur­ance,” Harden said.

“We don’t want to get to that point,” Whis­ton added. “Clearly if we do not find a fund­ing stream to get the money we owe, we’re going to have to.”

Whis­ton said he appre­ci­ates what the bud­get com­mis­sion has done with the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion – which is up from what was ini­tially cer­ti­fied last year.

“We’re trans­par­ent,” he said of the comms­sion­ers. “If you want to know where things are at, I’d be glad to go over it with any one of you. We’re not out of the woods yet as far as what we need to get, because more bills will come in.”

Posted by Taylor Kaser on Feb 20 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.