County budget nearly balanced at $4.2 million, in spite of revenue sharing cut

Members of the Presque Isle County Board of Commissioners approved the tentative budget for 2005 Tuesday and set the tax millage rate at 5.76 mills. As the budget stands in mid-October, the figures come out nearly balanced with expected expenditures of $4,236,566 and revenues projected at $4,236,566. The 2005 budget will be formally adopted in December. Tuesday’s statutory meeting was scheduled to conduct a public hearing.

Board chairman Allan Bruder wanted to call it a “working budget” because the numbers could change before the end of the year. “We were quite happy,” said Bruder of the budget discussions. After declaring the public hearing open, Bruder pointed out a line item at the end of the three pages of revenues that was listed as “revenue from reserve.”

BRUDER SAID it’s a fund being set up to cover revenue sharing that won’t be coming from Lansing for the 2005 budget. The legislature has approved a bill to move up the due date of county property taxes to offset lost state revenue sharing dollars. The bill would gradually move up the county property tax collections from the winter to the summer. The 2004 regular tax bills will be sent out in December, but one third of the county taxes due in 2005 are to be billed in July.

“We have to put a third of our money we collect in December into this reserve account and then we take our revenue sharing money out of that,” said Bruder. “Actually, this first year, we’ll collect $40,000 more to operate this year than what we would have had with just using the December taxes. The next couple of years we should be okay.”

THE PUBLIC HEARING lasted nine minutes, with no questions from anyone in the audience, just discussion and questions of different line items among board members. The sheriff’s department budget will see an increase from $451,134 to $521,749, with most of the increase is because of wages, mainly because there was a contract settled this year. The deputies’ wages increased from $293,931 in 2004 to $352,902 for the coming year.

On a related note, commissioner Mike Darga mentio

ned the loss of a grant to the marine patrol. The subsidy will see a decrease from $13,400 this year to $5,000 in 2005. Bruder said there was an increase in Blue Cross/Blue Shield of $17,000.

“WE MADE some changes and it doesn’t show very much of an increase,” said Bruder. “We made changes last year by going to the higher deductibles and that drastically changed the premium.” Bruder was pleased with the budgets submitted by county department heads and entertained a motion to send a letter commending them for their efforts. It was approved later in the meeting on a unanimous vote.

“We virtually didn’t touch anybody’s budget,” said Bruder. ” What they (department heads) sent into us, that’s pretty much what went into the budget. Everybody did a very good job.” Total contingencies for 2005 are projected to be $104,139. The “working budget” was approved by a unanimous vote of the board.

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