County budget requests can only go so far

Nov. 24--CANTON -- It is Thanksgiving week, but officials in the Stark County commissioner's office were subtly warning heads of county agencies not to expect holiday gifts in their 2018 budget appropriations.

At the end of Stark County Prosecutor John Ferrero's presentation of his budget request Wednesday morning, Stark County Commissioner Janet Weir Creighton wished everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and cracked a joke.

"Fill up on turkey because you're not going to fill up from the budget," she quipped.

Squeeze

The county's director of budget and management, Chris Nichols, has gone over the county's revenue situation at the start of each budget hearing.

After Wednesday's hearing, he said he expects the county's general fund and criminal justice sales tax revenue to decline by about $2.3 million next year to about $68.5 million due to the state's repeal of sales tax on Medicaid Managed Care Organizations. However, the state will give Stark County about $1.4 million for 2018 only to help offset the impact of the revenue loss.

Last year, the county appropriated about $64.9 million from the general fund and criminal justice sales tax. But Nichols said the cost of giving nearly all county employees 2-percent cost-of-living pay increases will be $600,000. The cost of covering a 7-percent hike in health insurance will be about $200,000. The county's contribution to the Multi-County Juvenile Attention System will rise by $100,000 and it will have to start making repayments of roughly $1.4 million a year with interest for a decade after borrowing $12 million to build the countywide radio system. And the county as a good budgeting practice wants to move the annual expense of $275,000 spent on Microsoft providing technical support and upgrades to the county's software from the capital budget to operations.

"I don't know anyone who's going to get what they ask for. Next year is going to be a significant squeeze," Nichols said.

Nichols will spend the next couple of weeks collecting and crunching the numbers needed to estimate how much general fund and criminal justice sales tax funds are left from this year for next year. It could be $13 million, and much of that will fund capital projects next year.

The commissioners are hoping to tentatively approve by Dec. 13 appropriations of funding in 2018 for each county agency that receives money from the general fund and criminal justice sales tax.

Prosecutor's request

Ferrero requested a 6.2-percent increase or $243,446 to $4.14 million in 2018.

The county prosecutor said he needs to hire a full-time information technology specialist to replace an information technology specialist his office was sharing with the Family Court. He said his staff often experiences delays in getting technological tasks performed such as placing scans of documents on a CD.

Ferrero also wants to hire a full-time victim/witness secretary to assist the office's victim/witness' advocates as well as crime victims. He said the job has been vacant since layoffs in 2011. And voters' passage this month of Issue 1, which enshrined legal rights for crime victims in the Ohio Constitution such as the right to be notified of the court hearings for their perpetrators, makes such a secretary more necessary. The cost of filling both positions would be about $75,000 a year. Step pay increases, where attorneys get pay increases beyond cost of living their first six years working for the prosecutor, will cost about $150,000.

Ferrero's request also includes some additional pay for his administrative assistant, 2-percent cost-of-living raises and a 7.5-percent increase in health insurance premiums.

The Stark Soil and Water agency, which educates people on conserving national resources such as soil and water, requested an increase in its general fund appropriation to $186,000 in 2018 from $100,000 this year. The agency of six has a total budget of $422,100 a year.

John Weedon, the agency's district administrator who started around July, said additional funds would cover the cost of his position as well as the hiring of an agricultural technician.

The Stark County commissioners also discussed the budget for the facilities department, which maintains the county's buildings. It has 12 full-time and three part-time employees.

Commissioners are looking at increasing that department's operational budget by nearly 13 percent or $262,751 to $2.3 million. The increase would cover the 2-percent pay increases and the filling of three vacant positions. That includes the hiring of a maintenance staffer with electrical and heating, air conditioning and ventilation experience and an assistant manager. The department also would have additional expenses including utility costs for two additional buildings.

"If we're going to have these buildings, we're going to have to maintain them," said Stark County Administrator Brant Luther.

The next day of budget hearings is scheduled to start at Wednesday morning at 10 when the Stark County Fair Board and the Sheriff's Office are expected to make budget presentations.

Reach Repository writer Robert Wang at (330) 580-8327 or [email protected]. Twitter: @rwangREP

___

(c)2017 The Repository, Canton, Ohio

Visit The Repository, Canton, Ohio at www.cantonrep.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.