During the Budget Workshop last week, County Commissioners received budget cut proposals from Comptroller Sherry Wideman and County Manager Jim Barbee that would bring the 2025 Fiscal Year expenditures closer to revenues.
Wideman provided information at the commissioners' request during their last meeting, which would decrease personnel by $804,000, services and supplies by $2.4 million, and capital outlay by $2.3 million. The proposed budget shows $43 million in revenue and $76 million in expenditures.
“Using a fund balance of $32 million, $22 million of that was capital outlay, which gave us a deficit of $10 million,” said Wideman. “What happened here is during 2024, our opening fund balance was less than we budgeted by $790,000, so we started in lower than expected.”
She noted that the overall fund balance was up $17.3 million due to the funding received from the Navy in the negotiations of the Fallon Range Training Complex agreement and COVID money that had been moved out of the general fund and put into the Capital Projects fund to build the District Court for $15 million.
“We need to cut budget, sorry to say,” Wideman said. “We need to remove the general adjustment for employees which was 3% for 2025 and remove the additional requested budget increases. We are also requesting to remove some unfilled positions and to delay or gap some of the unfilled positions that are sitting out there right now. We’re going to ask departments to decrease the remaining 2024 quarter expenditures to leave an unspent budget of 10%.”
County departments will be asked to cut their 2025 budgets by 15% based on going back to the remaining quarter of their 2024 budgets and cutting those by 10%, providing a 25% cut in the augmented budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year.
Wideman also said they will try to reinstate the CC Communication transfer to the county in 2025 for $845,000.
These measures would bring expenditures to $61 million, with $10 million of capital outlay leaving a deficit of $7.4 million. Wideman said she hopes the 15% and 25% decreases in the department budgets will cover it.
“Additionally, we’ll continue to pursue the Bureau of Reclamation money (repayment for the construction of the flood mitigation weir that was built last year and funded by the county) as an earmark, which is $4.7 million,” said Barbee. “That would then be one-shot money that would go towards the courthouse capital improvement projects.”
According to Barbee, some of the projects already in motion regarding capital improvement projects will be finished. “We will continue to pursue the courthouse and will continue with the old jail remodel so we can show that we are continuing to move forward to address the courthouse, which is not unreasonable in terms of the time it takes to fix the jail, move the sheriff out of the old bank building and demolish that building and have a place to build the courthouse will take a year,” Barbee said. “Then we would have a better idea of the capital outlay in that 12 months, get the $4.7, and move that COVID one-shot money into the courthouse construction.”
Commissioner Bus Scharmann asked Social Services Director Shannon Ernst how this would affect her projects. “It’s a lot. I’m worried about some of our rehab projects and construction projects.”
“We’ll have to address those as we deal with them,” said Barbee, “we’ll be able to do one-offs and make those decisions as we go. Those projects we’re in the middle of, where we have open walls, we must finish those kinds of things.” He said projects that have plans and designs done will probably have to be put on the shelf and look to the future.
“Things like CAPS we’re going to have to set aside and look at other alternatives. CAPS is going to have some needs that we’re going to have to address, but instead of a new CAPS building, what we may have, we’ve got the design and plans sitting there, but in the short term, we may have to work on a well for them and some of those kinds of offsets.”
According to Barbee, “We’re not in a bad position. We have somewhere around $20 million in standing one-shot kind of money. We have big projects out there, but we haven’t pulled the trigger on them so we can kind of control our destiny and our future.”
He said that there are at least three significant economic development projects that he is aware of that could positively impact revenue. He is looking to the SNPLMA funding, which would be significant in spreading that funding through the community over a three-year period, impacting sales tax.
“We don’t have a huge debt service commitment,” Barbee said. “In my mind, it’s much better to have a little pain right now than it is to keep putting it off to have a whole hell of a lot of pain. Part so the county will get pay increases in 2025 and some that will not, but we will all be employed.”
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