Commissioners face tough numbers for 2013 budget

By Randa Wagner -

The Mor­row County Com­mis­sion­ers have their work cut out for them in the next week as they strug­gle to shave $1.58 mil­lion in requested funds from what this year’s bud­get will have to offer.

“The bud­get sce­nario is not good,” said Tom Whis­ton at Monday’s elected offi­cials meet­ing. “There won’t be many peo­ple happy with us.”

The com­mis­sion­ers have been trim­ming the requests for weeks and are within $148,000 of the $6.88 mil­lion cer­ti­fied for this year. The final bud­get hear­ing is next Wednes­day, and county offices will learn what they have to work with for the next 12 months.

“I’m just telling you up front,” Whis­ton said to the elected offi­cials in atten­dance, “we don’t have a whole lot of money. The sit­u­a­tion might improve as money comes in, but our expenses greatly out­weigh our abil­ity to pay them. So we have to make cuts, and the com­mis­sion­ers will make those as judi­ciously as pos­si­ble so we can keep things operating.”

A num­ber of fac­tors con­tribute to the short­fall. The Title 20 (fed­eral monies that go to JFS) have been cut and the com­mis­sion­ers are faced with an addi­tional $320,000 in unpaid bills. The county now bears respon­si­bil­ity for child place­ments, which are out­side the 4E basis, that is not in the bud­get. These ser­vices are man­dated by the state.

“Over the last decade or so we’ve added a lot of debt,” said Com­mis­sioner Dick Miller. “That’s not a good sce­nario with a decreas­ing gen­eral fund bud­get. It’s not just the debt, it’s the upkeep on build­ings. Each year we should be putting aside funds to do needed repairs and we’re not doing that.”

“If you look at this from a cash basis where we were two years ago ver­sus now, the so-called ‘carry over’ has atro­phied so that we are, in my opin­ion, in the red,” Whis­ton said. “Not only did we expend all of the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion last year, we then had the bud­get com­mis­sion who gave us addi­tional funds. We spent all of that and more, which means we have less to begin with (this year).

Gen­eral fund money is what the Bud­get Com­mis­sion (the pros­e­cu­tor, the audi­tor and the trea­surer) cer­tify to the commissioners.

“The num­ber they give us is what they project the sales tax and real estate tax to be along with min­i­mal other income, and that’s what they ‘cer­tify’ for us to spend,” explained Miller. “That’s ALL the money the board of com­mis­sion­ers con­trols and has to spend. A large per­cent­age of it is already spent, for health insur­ance and debt retirement.”

“The notion that we have money to spend and if we spend it all, we can go back later in the year for more has to change,” Whis­ton added. “This is some­thing we need to under­stand; regard­less of what the bud­get com­mis­sion may do later in the year, we have to deal with the bud­get as it is – for the whole year. We’ve had carry-overs that peo­ple have con­cluded, ‘well, we have money.’ We have taken all our carry over money to the point where we have no carry over money. That tells me that, until now, we’ve been spend­ing money we didn’t have.”

Miller said when you hear the audi­tor say the county has a carry-over, that’s not a bud­getary carry-over, it’s a cash car­ry­over to run the county for a cou­ple of months.

“Like Tom said, what we should be doing is putting back dol­lars for when ele­va­tors go out in a build­ing or a roof needs repaired,” Miller said. “It’s a mis­nomer to say we’ve ever bal­anced the bud­get, unless you have enough to fund all your depre­ci­a­tions on all your build­ings and all your con­tin­gent lia­bil­i­ties, you’re only bal­anc­ing the cash you have in the gen­eral fund.”

Posted by Randa Wagner on Feb 6 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.