03 Jun Taxing you for the mistakes of others
On June 5, 2025 at 6pm, the Board of Supervisors is holding two budget hearings, school and overall County. If the Board agrees to provide the full funding asked for in these budgets, the County will be raising your taxes on property (both real estate and other) AGAIN, eliminate the rest of the reserves, AND will also need to borrow money.
Here’s a quick overview of the tax and spending increases over the past 10 years:
What, you may ask, has changed so dramatically over the past 10 years in terms of County services that requires $10 million more in spending plus drains the reserves?
The School Board’s financial mismanagement and problems have been ever more apparent and this year’s budget proposal will hopefully be the last in that trend. Since both the School Board and the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to have the County finances (all of them) managed by a financial expert, tax increases should come to an end.
However, the same leadership is still in place at both the School Board and the Board of Supervisors. Let’s look at the School Board first. The school board failed to set any priorities for the upcoming budget and without a financial director, the budget put forward by the prior Superintendent is the baseline to which more has been added and to NOT return taxpayer money to us:
2. The proposed budget includes over $742,000 for custodial salary and benefits. In 2022, the superintendent said shifting to full-time permanent staff would save money. Well, back then, at the height of COVID cleaning, the costs for 2021/2022 custodial staff and contracts was $602,000. Taxpayers are now spending over $140,000 more per year to “save” money on the contracts. This will only go up each year as raises and insurance go up.
3. Good news – This version of the budget does make corrections to past “over-estimations” of revenue and positions (particularly in transportation) and “under-estimations” in expenses related to benefits. There are also corrections to outside payments but it looks like duplicate funding is still being requested (books for the same grades in two places, miscellaneous expenses, etc. Using the baseline figure from prior years that baked in COVID spending will continue until this budget is zero-based, which requires a dedicated County financial expert.
The County budget proposal continues overspending and draining the reserves. The reserves are estimated to be at $3,000,000 or lower at the end of this year, from the starting point of $7,000,000 in July 2024. Part of this is due to planned overspending by the County (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncatJ6ZfHOA&t=176s) and poor fiscal management by the School Board leadership and prior school leadership. So far this year, overspending is estimated at $4,600,000 (quick video summary here: https://rumble.com/v6trnkl-time-to-act-on-county-finances.html) .
The only way to build back up the reserves is, you guessed it MORE TAXES and with the re-assessment coming next year, the Chair of the Board of Supervisors may backtrack on his promise to lower taxes by doing an equitable adjustment. No amount of taxes will satisfy this spending monster.
Take Action! Contact your Supervisor now and let them know your feelings on the proposed tax increase. Ask them to act now on their vote to bring in a financial expert for the County. We cannot afford to wait as there are not enough funds in the reserves to cover another $4,600,000 in overspending next year.
[For an excellent overview of the proposed County Financial Expert position, watch the video presentation made to the Board of Supervisors from March of this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RX7yNMtMMI]