Bamberg County Council: County planning next year's budget [The Times and Democrat, Orangeburg, S.C.]

May 25—Bamberg County Council gave first reading approval by title only to the county's proposed spending plan for the 2024-2025 budget year during a meeting earlier this month.

The budget has a general fund, along with separate accounts for special revenue, enterprise, debt service and capital projects funds, but no numbers were given during the meeting.

"We are still in the process of finalizing revenues and expenditures," County Controller Gina Smith said.

Budget figures will be complete by the budget's second reading on June 6, she said. The new fiscal year begins July 1.

Smith noted that the county is budgeting $1,165,077 for health insurance next year, which is $5,708 less than what was budgeted in this year's budget.

She said the county's decision to absorb 100 percent of premium increases resulted in employees not seeing any increase in their health insurance rates for many years.

The county's decision to continue this policy will result, for example, in savings of $3,678 for employees with family coverage, she said.

Smith also discussed retirement costs, which she said will increase from $836,127 this year to $985,910 next year.

"If you just look at it from FY-2018 to FY-2025, the increase in that one line item in the budget has increased by $571,260, which is an increase of 137 percent. That's sort of a tough pill to swallow, but that's something that we continue to fund," she said. "Overall, if we combine the health insurance and retirement, those two fringe benefits alone are going to increase by $144,075."

In personnel matters, Smith said the county has matched the first $1,000 employees make in 401(k) retirement contributions.

"This means that if an employee makes a minimum $1,000 contribution, then the county will match that to $5,000. Right now we have 17 employees who meet the threshold and are receiving that benefit. One tweak I'm thinking about doing this year is maybe lowering that from $1,000 to $500 because not everybody can put $1,000 in a 401(k)," Smith said.

Smith said the county will also be impacted by the federal mandate which has increased compensation thresholds for overtime eligibility.

"There's a minimum threshold for salaried employees," Smith said, which will increase from $35,568 to $43,888 beginning on July 1.

"Then it's going to increase again on Jan. 1 of 2025 to $58,656. ... We have determined that we have about eight employees that are going to fall into this category. There are folks like department heads that work overtime that historically have not been paid for it. What we will be doing is building in overtime in these departments," Smith said.

"This is a federal unfunded mandate. So just sort of throwing that out there," the controller said. She said $101,000 has been budgeted to provide for the expected additional costs.

She said the county would likely have to at least consider raising its millage rate, which has remained at an operating millage of 233.3 mills since the 2020 fiscal year.

"This formula is not going to work for us too much longer. This is just my observation. ... Since 2020, we've experienced unprecedented inflation. Some of it has been mitigated, thankfully, this past year, but the county has had to operate in this environment with no increase in operating millage," Smith said.

Inflation has taken taken a toll on the county's cash reserves and made it difficult "to maintain the expected level of services," she said.

Smith said the county is planning to make upgrades to its E-911 operations system, including adding new equipment and supplies, to the estimated tune of $249,771.

"I don't know if we'll manage to pay for all of it, but the plan will be to fund the project using existing E-911 tariff funds and financing as needed. I feel like there will be a financing arm to this plan," she said.

Information technology upgrades, including upgrading end-of-life servers, is a second project the county is eyeing in its budget.

"The biggest benefit to some of these cloud-based solutions is that it helps us to be prepared when there's a disaster. ... Anytime you can have what you need in the cloud as opposed to a physical server, then you're protecting yourself," Smith said.

"The total first year cost is $75,813. There will be annual and reoccurring costs to the tune of about $2,000. ... We're just asking to modernize how we do our work. I think we have to do that," she said.

Contact the writer: dgleaton@timesanddemocrat.com or 803-533-5534. Follow "Good News with Gleaton" on Twitter at @DionneTandD

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