By Carmen Ensinger
Members of the Greene County Board met in special session on Dec. 31 to take care of the year-end business and pass the 2025 budget.
After more than an hour of discussion on the budget alone, the board, almost more confused than when they started, ended up passing an unbalanced budget, with the hopes of revisiting the budget in February when they hope to pass a balanced budget.
Treasurer Kirby Ballard retired at the end of the 2024, but was actually out of the office the last week leaving interim treasurer Brenda Albrecht in charge. Ballard never let anyone else in the office deal with the budget but himself.
With an election in November, a new Finance Committee was appointed last month. This committee includes: Rick Ross, Rob Hall and Josh Lawson with Lawson being the newcomer to the committee.
“We must have spent six or seven hours on this budget and we can’t figure it out,” Ross said. “And Brenda (Albrecht) doesn’t have a clue.”
Ross was exaggerating a bit when he said they couldn’t figure it out because they did figure one thing out – the projected budget is way more than they will actually get due to the way it was figured by the former Treasurer.
“We spent literally hours on this and there are numbers in the back that don’t match the front part of the budget,” Ross said. “So, we went back to find out how much money we received from the tax levy last year and we added 3.99 percent to that figure for this year.”
Greene County is a PTELL county so it will never seen more than a five percent increase in the levy. But, to be sure and capture everything on the table, those in charge always levy higher because they never get the amount they levy for.
Ballard levied for 6.99 percent, the same as last year, and everyone made a budget.
However, when he factored in the 6.99 percent increase in revenue for this year, not only did he include the increase in all of the accounts, he also included all of the grants that were received by the county.
“So, it was an inflated number and we weren’t going to see all of that money ever so we took a real number that we came up with without the money from the grants that we knew was set in stone,” Lawson said. “We worked off that number as best we could, but we are still going to send his levy to the State and see what they pare us down to. We were shooting for the sky and dispersing to the sky and it was never going to pan out.”
Lawson said when they took out the extra money from the 6.99 percent income from the grants out of the budget, they were left with about a $210,000 deficit in the budget.
At this point, the committee set about doing some trimming.
“We ended up cutting $162,000 out of the budget, but that still leaves us with a deficit,” Ross said. “We made these cuts out of all the different line items. This was the only thing we could think of short of raising more taxes, which we didn’t want to do.”
Hall asked what about the ambulance fun.
“The budget showed $579,000 going to the ambulance fund,” Lawson said. “We pulled that down to $500,000 and spread that $79,000 out through the other levies.”
Castleberry asked Ross if they were good with where they were at now with the budget.
“No, I’m not good with it, but we want to pass it with the deductions that we have taken so far,” Ross said. “Then, we will get it in the computer and then go back and revisit it in February and see exactly where we are. We still have $80,000 in the contingency fund for next year.”
Helton brought up the increase in the courthouse security fund.
“I see the courthouse security fund went up from $20,910 to $23,500,” he said. “When they passed it they said it wasn’t going to cost us anything until the week after we passed it when Judge Day said we have to ask the county for half of it.”
Castleberry said the increase this year is due to the rise in salaries.
Board Member Mark Strang feels the Judge and his department should take more of a leadership role in paying for the courthouse security.
“He (Judge Zachary Schmidt) came in and told us about the big grant he got the other day so I think he needs to take a little bit more of a leadership role in paying for that,” Strang said. “There again, we just can’t afford to do all of this. I hate to be the one to cancel it in case anything would happen, but I realize too that you just can’t have everything that you want.”
Helton agreed.
“Plus, it is not making us any safer,” he said. “The officer sitting there disarms everyone coming through the door and the guy who is disgruntled with his wife comes in, takes him out and he knows no one else in there has a weapon so it has basically made everyone else less safe.”
After almost an hour of discussion, a motion was made to pass the budget as presented with the $162,600 in cuts with the intention to revisit it in February. The motion passed unanimously.