Story originally printed in the Vernon Broadcaster or online at www.vernonbroadcaster.com
Published - Friday, July 25, 2008
It may be too late to fix Vernon County budget
The Vernon County Board’s Finance Committee is leaning toward wiping off this year’s projected $500,000 deficit and making a 5 to 10 percent cut in next year's budget.
The committee met last week, but decided it did not have enough information to discuss recently proposed county government reforms proposed by the strategic planning committee.
The county started the year with an estimated $308,000 deficit that it had hoped would be eliminated by the end of the year through a hiring freeze that would leave empty positions vacated from retirements and resignations. That hiring freeze has not worked. Meanwhile costs increased and the county lost revenue in other areas. That has the deficit at about $500,000.
“On this $300,000, as we are sitting here, the clock is ticking and I just wonder if we are not going to just have to bite the bullet and get rid of that and take it out of the general fund,” said finance committee member Geoffrey Banta.
The latest financial reports puts the county’s fund balance at about $5 million, but the fund balance was $10 million a few years ago. The county used some of the money to pay off an unfunded pension liability with the state and used more as a down payment on the new jail and law enforcement center.
“I would like to see the actual numbers, so we know where we are at on that,” said committee member Ole Yttri.
“I would like to see that, too, but we have got to get rid of that $300,000 some way,” said Banta. “We can't go into the next year with that and we can’t expect the department heads, who have a 12-month budget and only have five months left on that budget, to be able to cut 5 percent on a 12 month budget. It’s too late.”
"But if you do it this time, it makes it easier to do it next time (use the fund balance),” said committee member Jack Robinson.
“That's the problem,” Finance committee member Brian Richardson said. “You start dipping in there and it is like a savings account that you take away and then another emergency comes up what are you going to do?”
Richardson said he was “so tired” to trying to find a budget fix because, “at every turn we go to we get beat on.”
Yttri said the county should never have budgeted with the deficit to start with and made the departments find the savings.
“Well that's true and we should have backed it up right then,” Richardson said.
The committee decided not to discuss a couple of budget saving measures that were forwarded to the committee last week from the strategic planning committee. The committed unanimously voted to postpone discussion on resolutions to combine a four county departments into two departments until more information is gathered on the potential impacts of the reforms.
Strategic planning committee chairman Todd Overbo was in attendance at the finance committee meeting and said the committee intends to have a “workshop” at the Aug. 5 county board meeting and have people from other agencies, which have implemented similar reforms, talk about the pros and cons of that process.
“We would more than happy to bring back an organizational chart and some hard numbers to the finance committee to your August meeting after we meet,” said Overbo. “We can bring an organizational chart with dollar figures to go with that so we can see the savings.”
“If there are savings,” said Yttri.
“Yes,” said Overbo.
Richardson said an idea to reduce all county employees’ hours by an hour a day seems to be going no where. Richardson said the union contracts do not allow for such reductions. County corporation counsel Greg Lunde said the reduction would only apply to a small pool of employees once union employees are eliminated from the plan. As for finding a way to stick to cutting the budget, a hard line was suggested.
“I think we have to say you have to cut 5 percent on your budget and you figure out with your employees how to do it, period.” Banta said. “And if (department heads) can’t figure it out we are probably going to have to lay people off.”
“I think that is a really good idea,” said Banner.
“I think we are taking on too much responsibility as a committee,” said Banner. “I think most department heads will be able to figure it out, but we have to trust our department heads.”
“I think the hardest part will be what is a fair way,” said Banta. “If you have a department with two employees and one with 50 employees... and revenue and it is going to be really hard to say 5 percent across the board.”
County clerk Ron Hoff said election costs are a good example. Hoff said he can’t really cut those expenses because he has a legal responsibility to print ballots at election time.
“I can’t just not print ballots,” said Hoff.
The committee unanimously passed a resolution to send to the county board in support of an additional .5 percent sales tax to finance repairs to the county’s 22 flood control structures. The county cannot impose sales tax without state approval but the county has asked local state legislators to ask state permission to impose the tax.
All stories copyright 2006 Vernon Broadcaster and other attributed sources.